Day 33

27th April 2023

Pinios to Kefalonia, Greece

We were up bright and early this morning as we had a ferry booked for Poros in Kefalonia from the next village down from us – Killini – which was about an hour’s drive.

I must say, I’ve never been to a port where you just drive to the ferry’s linkspan and show your ticket. There are no signs telling you were to wait or anything. When the ferry comes in it has an electronic notice telling you where it is going, like a bus .

But it all works, so who are we to question it? The ferry we were travelling on was bizarrely voted the most beautiful ferry in the world 2016. It was rather posh internally and the sandwich selection was mouth watering.

We had left Meg in the van for the 90 minute journey but seeing other dogs on deck, Gareth went back to the van and extracted her. Yes, he did have to extract her as she was holding on to the carpet by her nails. Once she was up on deck with us she settled and watched the landscape disappear.

The sea was such an amazing blue, we couldn’t stop being in awe of it, and though I kept wishing for a sighting of dolphins, today was not my day.

We had to keep pinching ourselves that we were sailing past Zakynthos (Zante) and heading towards Kefalonia. Seeing now how many ferry routes there are, it would be very easy to island hop – future trip material .

Landing in Kefalonia our first port of call was Sami. Strangely, ferries come in here too but from different islands and also Brindisi, Italy.

There aren’t too many places to stay here and we were going to go to a beach bar at Antisamos where Captain Corelli’s Mandalin was filmed, but when we saw the road narrow we thought better of it. Another time, with a smaller van perhaps.

We stopped in Sami for our early dinner, sitting on the seafront, out of the blustery wind that had picked up. So pleased our ferry was this morning .

While trying to park in Sami we saw flashing lights and a commotion further up the road. Gareth pulled the van over to the side as we saw the problem was a wide load. All of a sudden we realised the ‘wide load’ was both lanes wide! Tucking ourselves in was not going to be enough . We had to reverse all the way back to a side road we could fit the van down, helped by a very friendly policeman, phew!

Just outside the village is an attraction called Melissani Cave Lake. You can’t walk around it, you go down into it and get in a boat rowed by one of the assistants . It was 2 caves until one of the roofs caved in so now it’s a lake and a cave with artifacts from the 3rd and 4th century found here too.

The lake was closed when we arrived so we may have time to go down to it tomorrow, but are stopping in the car park for tonight.

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