Cold snaps through your bones,
Finding hollows in your core,
Frigidity, all.
We finally made it down out of the mountains today. Yikes, it's cold up there. Tomorrow will be unpleasant, too, but we are hoping to hop over and through to save ourselves from having to camp in it. Last night was cold enough.
Anyway, today started with some easy descent and a really long, flat path. We paused in a small town to have some oversweet pastries with lunch and to pick up water, but really the riding was roughly uneventful.
In keeping with our new goal, we stopped by around 15h in a town called Livadeia. There are a few reasons for this: we wanted to pause tonight just before hitting the mountains; also, we have a fair amount of time left to complete this trip, and there isn't so much distance left. If we keep it to a sane 80km or less per day, we should still do just fine and be able to make it to Istanbul on time. So we pulled into a café as we hit town.
It was called Piano Bar, and, unsurprisingly, it was decorated with jazzy decor and a large, beautiful grand piano. We sat down to use their free Wifi (which was pretty fast, as far as free Wifi goes) and to have some afternoon coffees. As we neared the time we'd aimed to leave -- we were hoping to get out before dark so that we could get supper started and find a campsite in the light -- the proprietor of the place came up to us and we talked about our trip and her life/flight from Russia in a delightful mixture of Greek, Russian, and flecks of English. Truly, we never get tired of this language game. Even when we can't really communicate, it's satisfying to try. :)
From the café, we headed to a supermarket complex that was rather confounding. It housed a bakery/café, vegetable and fruit stand, auto shop, and general food/stuff market. It was maybe the closest thing we've seen to a North American-style supermarket since we started this trip... but each of these parts seemed rather separate despite the fact that they were housed in the same building (which was a hideous yellow and blue creature). I think it'll be strange to come home and be able to shop for everything in one place, to be honest. We regularly stop at two or three stores to get all the ingredients for our dinner (one for starch, one for produce, one for meat or fish if we're having it...). Hm.
From the store, we headed out of town, looking for a place to sleep. We were shortly rewarded with a large building under construction that had a backyard and no workers wandering around. We parked our bikes out back and set up our stove on the unfinished floor of the first story.
The lack of light becomes depressing after a while... we feel like we're hidden away in the dark when we camp, and it's true to some degree. Tonight we ventured out with our cooked food (rice with feta and vegetables, plus the Greek bread rusk-tomato-olive oil combination) to sit under a street lamp and feel like real people for a little while. The light adds something. Not only can we see our food and each other, but it's almost... warm.
Anyway, we are rounding out the night with some episodes of MacGyver. The theme music to that show just slays me, and the fact that MacGyver is such an all-around good guy is somewhat distressing. It's cool that a smart guy can be a hero, but maybe they could've toned down the cheesiness. Maybe.