Koronisia and an Historic Bridge (Arta)

I'm contemplating sacking the staff.  Yesterday we went to Koronisia and Arta and instead of typing up my dictation about it all, F spent the evening sorting out photos between 4 or 5 bits of digital equipment.

F has two phones - one for work and a private one.  They both have photos on them.  Her work one is prevented (for security reasons) from talking to her personal laptop, but it will send photos by wifi direct to her tablet (which also takes photos).  Mr B has a phone and an underwater camera.  F likes to keep at least one copy of all the photos in files on her laptop (and has back ups on little plug-in things that I would hide if she didn't hide them from me).

One of her clever plug-in things has a USB connection on one end and a phone connection on the other - but her work phone won't talk to that either.  So it was wifi to tablet and then transfer to laptop, do several retransfers by wifi because files got corrupted in the process and the laptop refused to receive them, sort, file, catalogue, delete a few, save, lose a whole folder full, find it in the recycle bin and restore it.  I was losing the will to live.

It rained on and off most of yesterday.  We went looking for a boutique winery but never found it. All the classy navigational assistants that my humans had, kept leading us to the same place but it was a house in a village street surrounded by citrus and kiwifruit orchards.  There were no signs on the house or at the gate, nothing pointing us there except clever navigational assistants (which might have selected that spot as the centre of a postcode or something), so we drove around looking for vineyards.

The winery was meant to be somewhere in that circle just below Arta. Red circles the lighthouse, and Koronisia is the big blue circle.

We never found any.

We toured some very untravelled roads.  My humans seem to make a habit of choosing the least direct, or least travelled way they can of getting anywhere.  At one stage on the road shown below we came across a football ground, complete with a mini grandstand that would have seated all of about 20 people.  Middle of nowhere!

F telephoned the winery.  The man who rang back was out driving, and said there was no one else to show us around.

It must be very boutique.

So we gave up and went to Koronisia and filmed flamingos instead - just so that you would know how they sound when they are all gossiping together.

Going there (Koronisia is the low bit. The mountains are the other side of the sea)

Koronisia across the lagoon

Koronisia is a sort of island on the end of a long causeway.  In fact is is the biggest one of a group of islands connected by strips of beach, that surround a lagoon in the middle of the Ambracian Gulf.  People live on the biggest one.  There are churches and small chapels on the smaller bumps on the group.

The flamingos (and other waterbirds) are in the lagoon.  We saw some pelicans too but F failed to successfully (or successfully failed to) photograph them.  (A squadron of them flew over us the other day, and she missed those too! Doh!)

Then we decided to try some big, popular, and paved roads and went to Arta where we contemplated their 'historic' bridge, crossed it, had coffee in a waterlogged and more or less empty café with good views of said bridge and a very big very old plane tree of some sort with clever flaking bark.

Viewed from the cafe

And we could see my van across the river.