Picked up this morning for our 2 day bus tour up to Delphi and the Meteora Monasteries region – both unknown to us but seemingly the places to go for day trippers. It turned out to be a 3 1/2 hr bus drive up to Delphi to some very ancient ruins then from then on another 4 hours up to Meteora where we were put up for the night in a very nice hotel. A long drive to say the least but it gets us out of the city and into the countryside – even if the weather was cold and miserable. No rain as such but very foggy and misty and a little drizzle here and there.

Anyway, next morning our full busload of tourists headed off to visit the monasteries. These were amazing! The monks from centuries ago built their monasteries on cliff-tops to be closer to the heavens. How they managed it is another of those puzzling questions of what happened centuries ago and how remarkable people from that time were. The cliffs seemingly just push right up vertically out of the ground and then these monasteries are perched on top!

It was a fabulous tour around the region and well worth the long bus trip to get there. Our trip home was due to take about 5 hours but 7 1/2 hours later we were dropped off at our hotel!!!! Grr…… Athens traffic is horrendous – then throw in a couple of demonstrations and riot squads contolling the area and the traffic basically comes to a crawl!! However we made it back –  a couple of groups were dropped off near the demonstrators and told – your hotel is over there, but we can’t get to it. It was a quiet demonstration so shouldn’t have been too much trouble I would think – it was however a rather large number of people on the streets.