A view from the terrace

Our three-day stay in Ano Trikala Corinthias did not go as planned. The culprit? The weather. The plan was to visit lots of places in the surrounding area, to go for walks and most important of all, to sit on the wonderful terrace of our guest house and to enjoy the view

which includes parts of the village, the valley of the Zireia mountain range, going all the way down

to the sea, and the mountains of Roumeli across the water.

Instead, we got this, most of the time: a wall of cloud that would obliterate everything

There were times when it was clear, but within minutes we would see the cloud advancing, and everything would disappear.

At 1200 metres altitude it was not surprising given the weather we had. On our first night we had the mother of all storms with torrential rain, thunder and lightning. On our second full day, four fire engines climbed the mountain  - apparently lightning had struck a tree and a fire was raging further up from us - how could there be a fire, with all this rain, we wondered?

It rained the whole of our first full day, but the worst was the cold. We had left Athens with temperatures of 38oC and even though we were warned that it would be cold up in the mountains we were not prepared for a temperature drop of 26 degrees. We froze for our first day and a half. I have never been so cold, and for so long. We put on all the clothes we had, layer upon layer, but it was not enough. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that everyone smokes in Greece and it was impossible to sit indoors. So we sat on the terrace and just froze.

Fortunately, after 24 hours of sheer misery my sister's sister-in-law arrived with a thick jumper and thick fleece for me, and a bomber jacket for Ken and we finally, were warm enough.






The cloud would advance at alarming speeds - you can see it here, on the right of the picture, advancing,

and within seconds it was like this.

One minute we could see the village across the valley

and the next it was gone.

The weather improved for the second part of our stay and we were able to enjoy the view, but to also do some very pleasing walks.

I remember the moment when the mountain range across the water on the left side of this photograph appeared - for a day and a half we had not known it were there.