Thursday, January 28, 2016
Hello!
We’ve made it to Thessaloniki!! We were up this morning around 6 am and
showered and ready to go to breakfast at 8 am.
The mountain was quite literally fogged in, and unfortunately, we couldn’t
see anything of our wonderful lake view.
The proprietors of the Mir
Boutique Hotel are really quite lovely.
The man is hale and hearty, and kept clapping Robert on the back, which
you know he just loved. (That’s sarcasm
for anyone who doesn’t know R’s “thing” about touching!) Breakfast was great – two wonderful home-made
“pies” – like logs made of phyllo dough, one with apples and nuts and raisins,
and the other with cheese, a plate of ham and cheese (Greek cheese is
wonderful!) and ending with a warm rice pudding with cinnamon on top. Whew!
Also, lots and lots of freshly squeezed orange juice. Why anyone in this country of billions and
billions of oranges buys O.J. in a box is the real question. They shouldn’t even sell the stuff here!
Then everything back into the car, and off once again. I actually managed to back the car up the
severe incline out of the parking area we were on and get it back on the road
in one piece. Quite an accomplishment,
if I do say so myself, and as the car has a manual transmission, I managed to
only stall it once, when I first turned it on.
R very proud of me [backing up is not
one of Margaret’s strong points. – R] and I’m pretty happy about it! (Possibly the fog and not being able to see
over any edges helped a bit psychologically!)
Not really knowing what the tractors and protesters were up
to did lead to a bit of angst along the drive.
I had mistakenly thought that once we made the motorway,
that the tractors couldn’t access it … wrong!, as we found out as we headed
north, and came upon dozens and dozens of tractors all neatly lined up along
both sides of the motor way near a toll booth.
So … Emmy (the GPS) had projected that it would take us about 2½ - 3
hours to get from Ioaninna to Thessaloniki, and we were hoping to be
able to make the journey before the tractors moved into place to block the road.
What they seem to be doing is blocking roads
and other places for short periods of time – two hours to six hours (which I
don’t call short at all!) At any rate, we reached our hotel, Les Lazaristes, about 11:45 am. Got the luggage out, and found that our room
wasn’t quite ready, but we were happy to sit in the lobby and read for a bit.
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| Our "living room" |
The room was done in about half an hour, and low and behold,
we’ve been upgraded to a “castle” suite, on the 4th floor! It’s HUGE
and really quite lovely! (Although I
still find it interesting that they will SWEAR it’s “non-smoking” yet there is
an ash tray and matches in it!!) We have
a long entry hallway into our living room, which has couch, chair and table and
chairs. From there, you head into the
dressing area and nice big bathroom (with TUB!!)
and then into the bedroom that also has a very comfy couch. Also two TV sets, but as neither gets Eurosport, what’s the point of turning
it on?? In fact, I just confirmed a
massage for tonight with the spa downstairs, and a pedicure for tomorrow
evening! This was at R’s suggestion, of
which I am deeply appreciative! The
massage will be wonderful!
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| Our bedroom! |
Once we got settled into the suite, we headed – sorry,
folks, to the One Salonika Outlet Mall
and the nearest McDonalds! Yes, true
confessions…As it turns out, there are NO
McDonald’s at all on the entire west coast of Greece, and once you leave
Athens, that’s really about it. So it’s
not that I needed to have a Big Mac,
it was really more that once I COULDN’T
have one, that I just had to have
one! Does that make sense to anybody but
me? Fortunately, R was very nice about
it and not only navigated us to the Outlet Mall, but joined me in my insanity. So, lunch was great, and that’s now out of my
system (at least Robert certainly hopes so!)
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| The "other half" of our bedroom! |
Since my massage won’t be until late, I’m figuring we will
be eating late tonight – or maybe having room service, since we have such a
lovely place for it! (Hmmm…now there’s
an idea!) I’m sorry we don’t have more
photos; just our hotel, but we’ll make up for it tomorrow, I promise!
Our initial plan, before the tractors and protests, had been
to do some out-of-town sightseeing tomorrow, but now we’re thinking of staying
in town and seeing the Roman agora and
forum and the White Tower. But we’ll
see!
So, that’s about it for now from our lovely hotel!
m
xxx
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