After visiting the site, we left for Meteora, driving though a lot of
mountains and a few towns. One in particular seemed like a good place
to get lunch. On the way into town, we passed a church that seemed to
be made of poured concrete and fairly new bricks! We stepped inside
and looked around and went back to the car for our cameras. We went
back into the church and took a bunch of pictures.
We saw a curved staircase in a corner, looked at it, talked about
climbing it, and sort of talked each other into it.
We climbed nearly to the top before we realized the guy on the roof
could probably see us. We tried to be careful on the way down, and
started running down the stairs after we heard someone say something.
The guy started yelling toward/at us after we reached the the ground
and got near the car. He kept yelling the same thing. Bill tried
yelling back, in Greek, "I don't understand", but that didn't help. I
tried to change to a new roll of film to take a picture of the outside
of the church, but the guy kept yelling and Bill said, "I think he
might be trying to write down the license plate", so we left quickly.
We independently decided we didn't want to stop for lunch in that town
after all and kept driving.
Meteora is a place in the middle of the "central valley" of Greece
where rock pinnacles shoot up from the plains and monasteries perch on
top of the pinnacles. The highest monastery, Moni Megalou Meteorou
was built in the 1300s. Moni Agia Triada was in the James Bond film
"For Your Eyes Only". It is amazing to think about how it must have
been to build the monasteries with no roads. And to wonder what they
were thinking.
When we got to Meteora, we checked into Hotel Sydney and then drove up
into the rocks. We went climbing in some caves.
