A Vagabondage

By: avagabondage

Aug 15 2011

Tags: greece, holy cave, homer the odyssey, life, mount olympos, mountains, myth, northern greece, rest

Category: Life, Photography

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… Then Kirkê, loveliest
of all immortals, came to counsel me:

‘Son of Laërtês and the gods of old,
Odysseus, master mariner and soldier,
enough of weeping fits. …
Remain with me, and share my meat and wine;
restore behind your ribs those gallant hearts
that served you in the old days, when you sailed
from stony Ithaka. Now parched and spent,
your cruel wandering is all you think of,
never of joy, after so many blows.’

As we were men we could not help consenting.
So day by day we lingered, feasting long
on roasts and wine, until a year grew fat.

Homer, ‘The Odyssey’

While we engaged in little feasting (and, sadly, absolutely no getting down to it with immortals) we did while away more time in Greece than strictly planned: the intended departure to Turkey was never more than a week or two away, yet we wound up staying for all of July and some of August.

With temperatures pushing over 40ºC in the shade we initially fled from mosquito-ridden Thessaloniki to nearby Mount Olympos, found there a shady park-up with nearby stream at reasonable altitude, made new friends, discussed myths and gods in the cool of night and basically succumbed to the spirit of the place. We later moved on to another extraordinary mountain, Parnassos, home of the Delphi Oracle, but this is another story for another post.

Apologies to my dear readers for the long silence. Internet access is difficult to obtain in the mountains of northern Greece; it is also the case that the days rolled into one another in a way that made this period of time seemed to pass in a mere blink.

To those of you who have followed our adventures for a time and are wondering how the engine is doing – my superstitious nature won’t allow me to be specific, but do assume that no news is good news.