While tonight is not our last night on the trip, it is our last night in François so today was spent preparing to put him away for the winter. While Ton was packing our bags and cleaning up the interior I set off to try to find a car wash that could handle François. The manager of the campground told me that there was a car wash 2 or 3 km’s down the road, but he was not sure if it could handle François. I decided to walk down there to find out and they could not, but I did get my walk in for the day. François will have to go to storage a little dirty, but the storage site said they would wash him when we pick him up.
Nea Makri is located next to the town of Marathon which is famous for being the inspiration for marathon races. The story is that when the Persians were trying to invade Athens they landed at Marathon where the Greeks beat them in a major battle. A messenger was dispatched the 26 miles to Athens to tell the king that they had won, he ran the whole way at full speed to deliver his message and then collapsed and died. The Marathon of Marathon is scheduled to be run on Sunday and will use the road I walked down today but unfortunately we will be in Athens so will not be able to enjoy seeing the runners.
Today we were cleaning out the refrigerator so we had a little extra meat that we could feed to the campground cats. We have become quite popular and have an attentive pride of cats waiting outside François at all times now. Two cute white kittens have taken over the stool that we use to step on, and occasionally jump up on to François to see if Ton has prepared any more treats. If they weren’t so cute we would run them off as they are a little too persistent.
In the evening we took a walk down to the waterfront, and were surprised at how extensive it was and how many good looking restaurants there were. At the beach they had an interesting machine that is designed to allow a paraplegic or other wheel chair bound people to enter the ocean. It consists of a chair on a cable that goes down into the water to a pair of handles that allows the person to exit the chair and enter the water. This is the second one we saw, the first was at Missolonghi. It was designed and built by the engineering department at a Greek University and was very impressive.
