Rich and Cat's Travels: A week stuck in Athens

So while we were on the Greek islands we tried to organise our keys for the van but despite all our attempts Fiat were failing us and we were told the van would be recovered when we got back to Athens then the keys would be ordered but it would take 5 days to arrive.

We arrived into Athens at 4.30am on our ferry (we even paid for an upgrade on the ferry and got aircraft seats to try and get some sleep, it didn’t fully work but it was better than the lounge) and tried to find an open coffee shop to fill our boots with caffeine as we knew we would need it today. At 7.30am we headed to the car park where the van was going to be recovered from and waited with the car park owner. The tow truck arrived early but was surprised we couldn’t take the hand brake off but luckily the car park owner helped translate and the recovery guy eventually realised he might be able to take it off and sure enough he could. The van and us were then recovered to a Fiat Professional service place where they were going to order the keys. The manager explained it could take up to 10 days which we were not happy about and said he would order them the following day. Eventually we managed to get him to order them that day rather than the next day and told him to mark them as urgent as our emergency passports said we need to leave the country in 7 days.

After leaving the garage we phoned the RAC, who had recovered the van and said they would provide accommodation, there was a long wait and it was 3pm before we were given the hire car and hotel details. We got to the hotel at 5pm and made a couple more phone calls to sort things out before having a 14 hour “nap”.

The following day we actually looked around the hotel and boy was it a blast from the past. It was last updated in the 80s with patterned wallpaper and flooring. Our accommodation was bed and breakfast but the breakfast was not good, over cooked scrambled balls of egg, salty sausages, hot and cold feta, sweet bread ect but at least they had our favourite Greek yogurt and honey. The hotel also had a computer which meant we were able to do some online paper work to help our insurance claims ect.

After several hours on the computer we had to get out for a bit so we walked around the area to try and get some bits and pieces to keep us going but we pretty much failed to buy anything. Once back in the hotel we tried to plan the next few days and Rich suggested a restaurant from Trip Advisor which wasn’t that far away. So after a 40 minute walk we arrived at a restaurant which was empty but we did spot a busy place over the road so we headed there and it turned out to be an all you can eat and drink fish restaurant and we had a lovely meal with some beers. We were even too full to walk the whole way home so we got the metro part of the way home.

The following day we again spent most of the day at the hotel as locks for the habitation (back part) were due to arrive. Fiat couldn’t organise these so we had to sort this. Due to a mess up by Swift the locks never turned up so we had to start thinking about plan B for getting into the back of the van. We headed to Monastiraki which is an old district where there are lots of bars and restaurants with a variety of food.

The following morning we got up early and drive 4 hours to an area called Meteora which is where monks built monasteries and nunneries on top of large hill like rock formations. We managed to get to 4 out of the 6 buildings, we would have made it 5 but one closed early. We drove between the monasteries but on each of them you had to walk from the car park and you never knew how long or how steep it would be. There are paths to walk from one monastery to another but due to the heat we decided to give this a miss. After heading back for a shower we went back out to watch the sunset from up on the rocks before finding a restaurant for dinner.

The following morning Rich wanted to do a walk so we found a footpath and headed up it all the way to the top of one of the monasteries, finding a little turtle on the way. At the top we had a quick rest before heading back down and starting the drive back to Athens.

The following morning we had to check out of our hotel so we put our few belongings in the car and headed to the Fiat garage to see if the keys had arrived (it had just been 5 days). Sure enough we saw one of the engineers open our door, finally they had arrived! It would still be awhile before we could get in the van as they had to re-programme it so we took the opportunity to get ourselves ready to leave Athens. Our only problem now was how to get into the rear portion of the van. We found a local locksmith and after trying to find his shop a local lady working in a café helped us contact him and arrange for him to come to the fiat garage. After waiting for an hour we asked the garage to phone him and it turns out he couldn’t find the place so he went back, this should have given us a red flag. Anyway the garage gave him better directions and he showed up about 25 minutes later and after a couple of minutes he managed to open the water tank. He then said to open the rest it would cost an additional 30 Euros. We said no and that we had agreed on the price (already 40 euros for the locks) and after a bit of a Mexican standoff he agreed to do all of the locks for the original price.

We then jumped in the van and headed up the road to a coffee shop where we could spend 5 minutes sorting out the van which also somehow ended up with Rich running over our stool but we managed to get it out without any breakages to the van and stool. We then drove as fast as we could out of Athens to a camper stop 30 minutes outside Patras which was on the beach and spent the evening there. We had managed to book our ferry to Italy for the next evening and we had also booked camping on board which meant for once we could stay in the campervan on the ferry for the whole night which means we might actually get some sleep.

Due to our emergency passports we had to change our itinerary and we are no longer driving through Albania and Montenegro and instead are catching the ferry to Italy and driving up the east coast to Slovinia and Croatia where we hope to get our passports from.