Too long without sleep,
And bodies shut down. Rest them!
They can't always bike...
Today was unpleasantly punctuated with frequent stops for vomiting and other rather gross bodily discharges, so we'll just mention that here and not bother interspersing it with descriptions of our lovely day. We're pretty excited to get to Kalamata and take a break from this nonsense so we can get well.
We woke up as early as usual, eating our now-typical breakfast of yoghurt (what a good spelling!) and being amused by our new neighbours. I guess we're pretty good at choosing campsites now; the first thing we saw when we pulled aside the tent flap this morning was that two Bulgarian-plated RVs had chosen to camp themselves in the same spot we did. :)
One thing we're still not good at is the whole "oh, it's Sunday" business. We rolled down to the ferry dock and discovered that the ticket booth wasn't open at 8, although the ferry was scheduled to leave at 9. Then we looked more closely and realised that the ferry only leaves at 9 on weekdays, and it is, in fact, Sunday today. So we were forced to wait an additional three hours and take the ferry at noon. Really, it was a better ferry to take: the weekday ferry goes across to the close tip of the island while the weekend ferry touches a big city in the middle of it. Our ferry off the island (from a town called Poros) is at the far end, so this ferry gives us a slightly shorter ride.
We poked around town for some breakfast and settled on delicious sweets (they were similar to baklava, but instead of filo dough they involved a sort of pastry that is small pastry threads woven almost like a bird's nest -- called kataifi) and crepes from a stand. We wiled away some time in a café playing adventure games (we're becoming far too lazy to actually write these blog posts on any reasonable time schedule, sigh) and hopped on the ferry, tying our bikes in the basement. We sat on top the ship and ate a snack, then headed down below for some stomach-settling tea and more games.
We arrived in Sami at about 15h, then checked quickly around to see if the ferry indicated on our map, which appears to leave from Sami, actually existed. It didn't. As everyone had told us, we would have to bike the 34km to Poros to catch the ferry back to the mainland. Well, okay.
A glance around from the ferry dock revealed that pretty much everything around Sami was mountainous. That sucks. We found a sign bearing the schedule of the Poros-Killini ferry, and the last one for the day was scheduled to leave at 18h15... so we had roughly 3 hours to get across those mountains before we would have to check in to the other ferry. We hopped on our bikes, and after being pointed in the correct direction (frustratingly, the road out of town leaves to the southwest while Poros is nearly due east) by a helpful old woman, we headed out.
The ride through the mountains was lovely, as all our rides through mountains tend to be, although this one was slower than most due to circumstances mentioned previously. Fortunately, the 34km ride proved to be nearly exactly 17km up and 17km down, so we managed to make it by 17h and even get some snacks for the ride before boarding. This second ferry was much larger than the first, and instead of just a couple large trucks it bore more than a dozen 18-wheelers plus trailers. It was an impressive sight, I must say.
Among the other passengers on this second boat was a local football team that appeared to be celebrating a victory. They sat near us and had paper fights for the duration of the ride, sheepishly offering apologies when they hit our laptop screen. We played more adventure games, realising finally that we were stuck in both "Maniac Mansion" (how do you get through the door with no handle?) and "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" (where in the hell do you get the title of the Lost Dialogue of Plato?). I took a nap.
By the time we landed in Killini, it was pretty dark, and we were both feeling pretty ill, so we biked just a short way to get gyros for dinner and stop. We found a site next to a house not-yet-constructed and parked ourselves against some tall reeds. It's comfortable enough, but the traffic from the nearby road can be noisy. We're both tired enough to sleep, though, so it should be good enough.