Firstly, the saying "Be careful what you wish for - you just might get it!" almost never held truer than last week. On a rather boring and uneventful night, after many such similar nights (and also after I had just recently commented on the lack of adventure so far) I found myself wishing for a little something different to break up the routine. The VERY next day I was tooling along towards my turnoff out in the middle of nowhere, when a police car screams by, jams into the intersection, and proceeds to block traffic off (including me) from using that turnoff. Ehh? Whatever... He didn't speak English and obviously didn't have the patience to try to translate, so I proceeded about 10 km down the road to an alternate turnoff that would take me in the same direction. But when I got there, the same thing greeted me: cops blocking off the road, only this time there were about 30 cars and trucks stacked up around the intersection with people hollering and gesturing, news cars and cameras loitering around and shooting anything that moved (if you happened to be watching local Greek news on satellite tv, you might have seen me!), but no traffic being allowed down the turnoff. Asked a local what was going on, and was told that a Greek man from the region had supposedly been shown proof of his wife's infidelities, and had gone ballistic and shot her mother and his best friend since childhood (the suspected lover), and then hijacked a tourist bus with 33 Japanese tourists! At the time I pulled up at the intersection, he was currently headed to Athens (coincidentally my destination for the next day) and the nearest OPEN road for me to there was 100 miles away! Stuck! But after waiting about 45 minutes, the situation was obviously resolved as the police drove off and I proceeded on down the road, little suspecting the significance of the entire event. It was only after a couple of subsequent days-worth of news and newspaper articles did I find out that a) the resolution of the whole thing took the form of the highjacker surrendering to a local talk-show host, being arrested and processed, and then DIVING out a 5th floor police station window to his death! and b) he'd highjacked the bus and driven down the same road I was supposed to take only a couple of hours earlier, at most! Wow! You can almost picture the scene: "Heh, there's a tourist on a bike up ahead. Wonder how much publicity I can get if we run his happy butt over..." So, no more wishing for adventure for me! If it happens, it happens, but I think I can do without actually hoping for much of that.

Secondly, and the most amazing of all: If anyone can calculate the odds on this event happening, I wanna know what they are. So, I finally get to Athens after a pretty long day of riding, and am pleasantly surprised by the place. Not that its a beautiful city or anything - in fact its pretty much dirty and polluted, as many large metropoliseses can be. But some guys I'd spoken to in Brindisi had maligned it so badly that I fully expected to be riding through raw sewage or dodging thrown stones or something. And of course it just turns out to be an average big, noisy, dirty, vibrant, old, fashionable city. Lots going for it, but the usual downsides that come from 1+ million people living and working in close proximity to each other. And I was very happy for the change of pace. So I tooled around for a bit, scanning side-to-side for a cheap-looking hotel, and found a place on my second stop, very near the center of the city and close to all the action. Cheap it was, and deservedly so. What a sh**hole! I have NEVER seen more cigarette burns in floors, sheets, mattresses, etc in my life, and I try hard not to walk around barefoot here. But that was also all part of its charm, somehow. (I'm sure some of you out there are shaking your heads and wondering if "that boy's alright, or sun-stroked or something", but 2 weeks in a tent can leave you appreciating some pretty different things.)

Anyway, long story longer: I dump my stuff and head out to orient myself on a really bad map and find some grub. A local guy gives me some really great directions, but decides now's the time to practice his English. Yeah, ok, I appreciate it, but I'm hungry, dude. Manage to extricate myself after a few minutes and head back to the hotel to go the other way. Stop at a light right by my place, look left, and notice 2 cute, obviously American women with backpacks on, looking around for their place to stay. Look a little closer... Holy smokes, that's Skyla, Matt Stafford's girlfriend! In Europe!! In Greece!!! In Athens!!!! Hell, right across the street from me!!!!!!! I scream out her name , she looks over and all jaws hit the ground as they both walk over and I spend the next 10 minutes babbling in amazement. Turns out she and Brooke were spending a (shortened) vacation together in Italy and Greece in a bit of free time, and we just ran into each other! In Athens! It all sounds so easy and simple now - but then it really seemed a bit surreal at times, as though I expected any minute to look up and see the sights of Missoula, not the Parthenon and gyros stands. The three of us ended up spending the evening together wandering around the center of the city, and then the next morning out at the Acropolis, before they caught their plane back to sunny northwest Europe. That morning, as they drove off in their taxi to the airport I looked around for a second, feeling a bit lost and disoriented and wondering where to go and what to do, and then physically sagged a little as I realized I was alone again, and that what I chose to do that day once again had absolutely no bearing on anyone but myself. It's great to have that freedom, but it comes at a pretty high price sometimes. We'd had such a good time together and got along so well, but our time was much too short. However, I wouldn't trade it for the world - what an experience!

As for Athens itself, things are going pretty damn well. But I'll save those comparitively boring details and the archeological stories for a couple of days from now....

Andio! Mark