Route of Truce

 Yesterday F saw this map.

 It plots out the towns and villages on something called The Route of Truce.

F studied it carefully and sort of reverse engineered the route into our navigation system and today we set off enthusiastically to travel along it. (It says you can walk or drive. It didn't mention bicycles or mule trains.)

First bit...pictureskew villages, flattish farmland, hillsides burned out in last Summer's fires. Fire scars aside, everything is green and lush and sprinkled about with colourful wildflowers. 

Long before we got to Sopi we were in amongst the hills again. They are low hills but they couldn't be described as rolling. They are the jagged evidence of some powerful tectonic events at some stage in the earth's history. Some bits of them used to be on the bottom of the sea...

All around Sopi the growing stuff was grape bushes (possibly vines but in this season thay have not a scrap of new growth of any kind, so they jusy look like scruffy brown sticks). There are, however, a lot of them. Long before this stage of the route Mr B had worked out that there were arrow sign posts to guide us, so the navigation was easy.

Then the wheels very nearly fell off... we turned off the tarmac onto a concrete road.

I think humans refer to roads like this as a 'goat track'. The concrete ended a few metres round the first corner.  After that it was dirt, mostly, except where it was mud... or it wasn't at all. It might be a great walk, or a fun ride on a mountain bike, but it was a bit challenging in a Peugot Escapade van...... with a roof box.

Lots of kilometres later we had passed squillions of olive trees,  climbed onto a few bits of concrete track that were laid probably to repair constantly washed-out corners only to create horrible ledges where the track washed out under the edge of the concrete, negotiated a few van-swallowing potholes, and 350 metres from a ROAD found ourselves with a wheel hovering over an axle-breaking ditch. 

F climbed out and waved her hands around a bit and Mr B winched the steering wheel right over and inched along....

Shortly after we joined the ROAD we were being directed off onto another dirt track.

We elected to take the long way round.  We were lucky the first time, so let's not push our luck. If it had rained while we were doing goat-tracking we wouldn't have made it through. Winter had not been kind to that part of the route.

After pulling up in Ancient Elis we mapped out a route to Patras via the dam of Lake Pinios. We stopped there for lunch. I ate the bacon out of F's sandwich. She was busy admiring the view. It is in an area with lots of polytunnels. We even saw cabbages growing under olive trees on our way there.

The northwest part of Peloponnese is very productive. Lots of human food comes from there.

I like bacon sandwich filling.

Patras Bridge eventually came into view, and toll collection booths, and a couple of hours later we were home.