5th May; the remains of the day and into 6th May

Back at la Cabine Pascaline invited me to join me her for 'some light snacks' that she had prepared.  I do not know whether it was her delicious 'light snacks', the wine she served or the mountain air that caused me to sleep so soundly but I woke refreshed and ready to begin my long week of travelling.

The 6th May dawned dull and wet in La Houches but I had only a couple of hundred kilometres to drive to Châtenay, my next stop.

5th May; More of Italy and Into France

Exterior wall mural, Chamonix

The now indispensable Sat-Nav led me from Brunello along attractive, traffic-free by roads towards the Monte Bianco tunnel.  Quite late on I joined the main road which I followed through the tunnel into France where I arrived at lunchtime on a fine spring day.   ‘La Cabine de Pascaline’, my booked home for the night, where I was not due to arrive until later in the afternoon is but five minutes from the tunnel exit so I drove on for a further ten minutes into Chamonix to while away a couple of ours over lunch.  Chamonix is a most agreeable place to spend a few hours.  It has an abundance of cafés and restaurants to suit all tastes and budgets and I soon found a place that looked as though it might suit my simple tastes.  It did!

Fishy starter!

Porcine main course

Creamy dessert

4th May, Italy

During the past twenty years I have become a moderately frequent visitor to Venice.  I like the city very much but it is no place to be lumbered with a car so I hastened from the port to cross the lagoon and get onto the Autostrada for a quick, if uninteresting, 300 km drive to Brunello, a delightful village surrounded by lakes and snow-capped mountains, not far from Como.

2nd May 2013, Leaving Home

Home, shortly before leaving

My ferry booking to Venice was due to leave Patras at midnight on 2^nd May.  I had all day to pack the car and dawdle the 250 kms or so drive to the ferry port so chose to set my Sat-Nav to ‘shortest’ rather than ‘fastest’ route.  After having a serious problem finding a B&B in the residential back streets Reggio Calabria last year I bought a Garmin Sat-Nav.  The drive this year to Patras was its first meaningful test, a test it passed with flying colours.  This incredible gadget led me along empty roads through beautiful mountain villages where preparations for the Orthodox Church Easter were busily under way.  In the shade of leafy glades the slaughter, flaying and disemboweling of pascal kids and lambs was quietly taking place before entire families; rituals which, possibly by millennia, pre-date the Orthodox and all other Christian churches.

Country road, Northern Peloponnese.

The Ferry departed on time and, after an uneventful journey, I arrived at Venice early on Saturday 4^th May, on time in Venice.

A Mnemonic

Methoni, 29th April 2013

In order to to keep some sort of record of my third pilgrimage to Ireland I am resurrecting my neglected blog.  I have no idea what provoked my first impulse, as recently as 2011, to visit the country but when I am there I am aware of a pleasantly comfortable sense of attachment and contentment.  Weather apart, Ireland, it seems to me, has much in common with Greece, my chosen domicile for the past fifteen years.  I find the people of both countries naturally warm and friendly with a common-sense rather than strictly law abiding attitude to life.   My Delphic attraction to Ireland though has more to do with a sense of place somewhere deeper within my psyche.  Since to my knowledge not a drop of Irish blood pulses through my veins, my attraction to Ireland is indeed a mystery.  

Yuletide Greetings!

Yuletide greetings and best wishes for the coming year to all visitors to my blog.

A dove rises from the first sunrise of a new year anticipating peace, light,
 regeneration and the munificence of being.

St Andrew

To those to whom it applies - best wishes on this your name day!