Greece and Turkey 2015: Museums, Icons and Monestaries

Not sure we can adequately describe what we saw today! The day began with a quick look at the promenade along the bay in Thessaloniki and the "White Tower". Then across the street to the Archeological Museum. We saw stuff daring back to 3000 B.C.!

We reboarded our coach (new coach, new driver) and headed west out of town on the A2 to Veria. We drove into town to visit the "Monument to St. Paul". Not very impressive. Rev. Biggs gave a stirring prayer at the conclusion of our visit!

We returned to the A2 highway and turned south through Kozani and Greneva. The landscape is beautiful! Rolling hills with agriculture of all sorts; mountains in the distance. Little villages here and there but mostly vacant farm lands.

At Greneva we turned off the main road and headed up into the mountains on Rt 15. Its a windy road with hairpin turns, a sure challenge for our coach driver! The views are great. The summit was about 7000 feet. We don't think of Greece with mountains but our guide explained that the inland part of the country is very mountainous. There are even some ski resorts up here (Although not very popular!)

Over the summit, down the other side, we come to the village of Meteora and the "Rock Forest", an unbelievable geological formation that was never expected. Huge rock columns on top of which are a number of monestaries and nunneries. Spectacular! You can't visit them all, so we went to the nunnery called "St. Stephens", mostly because it was the easiest to get to. The small church was covered inside with beautiful frescoes depicting scenes and stories from the bible. (They wouldn't let us take photos).

Also in Meteora we visited a famous "icon" store where tourists like us could load up on "authentic" souvenirs, which we did!

Just up the road from St. Stephens there were places we could pull off the road and get spectacular views of some of the other monestaries, most notably Holy Trinity. The weather wasn't good for photography - sun in our face, some clouds and fog rolling around. One really should come here in the morning.

Finally, as it was getting dark, we headed back down the hill to our hotel the Hotel Meteora. Nice modern facility built in 2006. View of the "Forest" right off our balcony. Great dinner, too!

(Slow internet here, pix are a bit out of order)