West, south, north….who knows

Looking at the map last night we realised maybe our direction was a little bit off. The coastal road would have been much quicker, but still we are in no hurry and it gives us the opportunity to drive through some more mountain scenery.

But the reality is, this detour couldn’t have come at a worse time, as yesterday, while at Delphi Dora started to play up.

It was actually her sophisticated filter system that takes out all the nasty particulates. We have had a few problems to date, but this was mainly down to not knowing the system and how it works. Yesterday however the system went red, something wasn’t working. Bizarrely it did this over our rather sad lunch, Dora wasn’t even moving! Suddenly the light was red and the key wasn’t even in the ignition. Luckily when we were in Spain and having the system serviced the mechanics had given us the cable that allows us to download all the data she produces; seriously Dora is like a formula one car and produces all this telemetry, the only difference, her top speed is 100 kmph.

We were told in Spain that when the light goes fixed red, an immediate service is required. Great, this is what we needed!! If that is the case, this means we have to look for a high specialist Pirelli garage and deal with them in Greek. We have come across some downs in our travels, but not like this one. This year Dora is our most precious asset. If she breaks down we are in deep shit. SM.

So yesterday at lunch we plugged her in, downloaded all the stats and sent them off to out helpful friends in Spain and Pirelli in Italy, but you will have to read to the end of the post to find out how this particular story ends!

Suffice it to say we were rather nervous as we headed off west, a red warning light showing on her system and a good deal of driving planned for the day, and on top of that driving through a mountainous terrain.

But as we headed out of Lamia, all was well, the road was good and fairly flat.

We were making good progress.

and the kilometres passed quickly

But gradually the terrain once again started to become mountainous.

With snow capped peaks surrounding us. Now I never really realised that Greece had mountains. Well I had heard of Mount Olympus, but that is about all. Here we are late April and the mountains are still white. It was quite a shock.

But it does make for amazing driving.

Now one thing I should say here is that we do not have a satnav.

In this respect we are thoroughly old school. We use a road map, and it is pretty out of date and of a scale of 1:1,250,000 so lets say the majority of the roads are not shown, which is probably not a bad thing as the ones not shown are probably the ones we wouldn’t want to take Dora on anyway.

I have never been very good at orientating. I am getting much better this year thanks to our travels. However, I am learning the hard but probably the most effective way of reading maps. Precisely because Gary, due to his love for maps, refused to get the satnav. It still amuses us how people look at us when they see us trying to find our way around a mountain with a paper map version. SM.

We also do not use GPS when out trekking, once again preferring paper maps, this is probably why we get lost quite a lot!

So far, we rarely get lost while on the road.

But today, of all days, as we were having trouble with Dora, we get lost!

And to be honest, we are not sure at what point we do actually get lost,

but it is in some seriously mountainous terrain,

and on some fairly twisty roads,

although thankfully most of the time they are in reasonable condition.

Eventually, I am not sure why, we stop.

Something tells us we are not on the right track.

This is what I mean. I was navigating. I didn’t know where we were but something wasn’t right. Some sort of navigating skills are sticking somewhere in my brain. SM.

We ask a couple of walkers, who confirm, somehow we are way off the mark, we have headed deep into the mountains.

Our only option is to head back.

This is obviously a little bit disappointing, we hate retracing our steps, but we are concerned about pushing on, this road we are not even sure appears in our road atlas.

So we turn around and head back up the hill to the last junction.

Is that Agrinio in Greek, few of the signs around here are translated, it certainly looks like Agrinio.

A small white car turns up, we ask.

Yes it is Agrinio, we are heading that way, follow us.

He heads off like Sebastian Vettel.

Poor Dora tries to keep up.

The road deteriorates, occasionally disappearing completely, only to reappear around the next bend.

Each time this happens we breathe a huge sigh of relief.

At least this has taken our attention away from the ever ominous red light of Dora’s filtration system, thank Darwin for small mercies!

Will this day ever end?

The mountains seem to go on for ever.

Eventually, down below us appears a large lake.

Agrinio sits at the end of a lake, this must be it.

Our saviour in a white car has found traffic, allowing Dora to catch up.

We gradually drop height.

And are soon driving around the lake, where we say goodbye to the couple in the white car, thanks very much.

We head on a little further trying to find somewhere to park. It has been a stressful day.

Eventually we find an old abandoned petrol station, which in the circumstances will do us just fine. Another not so good place to spend the night, once we have sorted out Dora we will have to spend more time looking. Maybe the mountains will provided better opportunities.

We are just outside Arta.

The next morning we continue up towards Ioannina, and on the outskirts we come across an Ikea. Not only do we want to get a couple of bits; a corkscrew, tea-clothes (ours are getting really manky) and they have free Wi-fi.

We have also arranged to Skype with our friend in Spain.

He tells us there seems to be a problem with the connection between the engine and the filter system. This is showing red in the telemetry. I fiddle around, locate the alternator, and check all the connections in the main wiring box, but I am no mechanic an I cannot find anything wrong.

Hold on a minute, he says.

Let me have access to your PC.

He takes control.

I am going to perform a reset.

The mouse wizzes around the screen in a ghostly fashion, all by itself, controlled by a guy sitting in an office in Spain.

After a couple of minutes the light which was solid red starts blinking green.

Dora wants a manual re-generation. We rev the engine, causing quite a fuss in the Ikea car park.

To regenerate Dora needs a hot engine. After a couple of minutes, the engine is hot enough and we can see on the computer screen that regeneration is taking place.

We can also see that everything is now all Ok with the system, somewhere there must have been a software error.

Thanks David.

What a relief, we had imagined all sorts of difficulty in trying to get the system fixed by some Greek mechanic, trying to explain about the filtration system.

All is back to normal, we head into Ioannina for a spot of sightseeing.

GDR