As Drew and Kallie mentioned, we are alive and well in northern Greece! In the interest of time and cutting down on cold rainy weather, we took a ferry from Ancona, Italy to Igoumenista, Greece. Greece has been very mountainous and sparcely populated, but very beautiful. The Greek people have been more smiley than the Italians and very welcoming.
We stayed with a kind couchsurfing host in Igoumenista, Ozan, a 20 year old foriegn student from Turkey who was brave to take us on after only moving in himself 1 month before.
And tonight, a Godsend, Jason, approached us in the street after a hard day of mountains, rain, and cool weather, to invite us in for coffee, that turned into hot showers, that turned into staying the night. He and his roommate, both young Americans, hosted a Lord of the Rings 3 viewing tonight with about ten other people. As movie nights for us are quite rare, this was perfect and well appreciated. Oh, and did I mention they bought us dinner? Huge Gyros the size of my head. Most Excellent. Thanks, Jason, for being our 2nd spontaneous host!
Back in Florence, Italy, we a had a very giving host, Leonardo, who prepared us a hearty traditional Florentine meal our first night and took us on a three hour bicycle tour of off the beaten path outer Florence the next day. We followed up the next night with our home cooked Indian curry.
With Leo in Florence
THANK YOU to all of our hosts!
And we of course had to make the mandatory stop since it was right on our way:
Peter’s bike, the Forrest