Polidendri to Volos

Saturday Oct 15
Polidendri to Volos  73km  Total 3775km
1400m of climbing today - our biggest for the whole trip.

Last night turned into a bit of a party.  The brothers - Apostoli and Vasalos looked after us so well.  Fresh walnuts and some of their grandmother's home made wine from cranberries pre dinner then a carafe of wine with our dinner of specially made spaghetti.

Then they and the local boys asked us to join them to drink tsipouro and raki.  They turned the music up full volume - lots of AC/DC and kept on filling the glasses.

The guy on the left spent a few years in America and spoke really good English

Vasilus and Apostoli with their dog pluto

Finally got to bed after midnight, having drunk way too much.

The hotel didn't open until midday, so they packed us a basket of food for breakfast, and we took the leftovers to eat along the way as we weren't going past too many shops.

We had a friendly dog join us from the start.  It was an 800m 18km climb first up so he could easily trot along with us.  It was almost as if he was protecting us.  We tried to lose him on a few downhills but he kept on catching up as soon as we went uphill again.  We felt bad leaving him once the main downhill started.  He was in the middle of nowhere up in the clouds.  Hopefully someone finds him and looks after him.

Our friend

View back down to the Aegean Sea, half way up our climb

The descent down the other side

You can just see Dermot in the distance

We stopped at a small village to find something to eat and drink.  Translations can get a bit mixed up though.  Somehow we ended up with 2 toasted sandwiches instead of 1, and we thought the drinks were going to be milkshakes but they turned out to be incredibly strong undrinkable coffee with ice and some sort of creamy white stuff that didn't taste any good either.

The locals suggested we go from here to Volos along a flat course, but we figured we'd do another climb to stay on the quiet roads.  Eventually to the top and then the descent into Volos.

We'd ridden from the bottom of this village

Volos in the distance

Volos

We're staying in a nice AirBnB on the 8th floor with a beautiful night view of Mt Pelion.