57. Pyrgos to Sami, Kefalonia

Last year….the road between Pyrgos and Patras was probably the worst we rode on. A nice two lane road…with good shoulders…was in the process of being converted into a three lane road with no shoulders at all. Daft bit of re-engineering by someone who has evidently never been on a bicycle! All now complete! Alternating overtaking lanes…and with permanent ‘cones’ to keep the single lane single! So narrow…a car can squeeze past a cyclist…a truck cannot! So you just have to hope the truck is not in a hurry!! And they usually are!

Anyway…we made great plans to avoid the 32km stretch of our bete noir……but four kms in we came across an unfathomably deep ford. Possibly not deep at all…but we could not tell. And were worried there may be a heap more…so eight kms on…and we were back to where we started.

With a ferry to catch!

No option but to bite the bullet.

And to be fair…it was not so bad…10kms of service road helped….and another alternative route kicked in about five kms later. We simply held up the traffic when we needed to (heart in the mouth stuff)…& rode in the middle of the road when possible (they close the middle lane near junctions!).

And afterwards…..a bike path!! (..this seriously was the full extent of it!…)

….and a pleasant 30km run through to the port of Kyllini…

….where our ferry awaited us! And what a ferry!! The cleanest most luxurious ferry I have travelled on! Not like the Greek ferries of old at all!! (Levante Ferries if you’re passing this way!)

And so we were on our way to Kefalonia. And I have to admit that I had not heard of it until I started planning this trip. But a route which avoids Patras (en route to Igoumenitsa) and avoids ‘that’ road (well, most of it!).

The main island port is at Poros….a sweet wee place…..facing the beach…the water was just spectacular!

We had opted to stay at Sami. A 24km meander away.

Yeah right!! Of the 900m of ascent today…all but around 100m was on this little hop!

So 800m up over about 10km! It was steep! Gorgeous! And HOT! The first hot ride of the trip. Sweating buckets….and just before the top..I got the serious munchies. A first for me on the bike!! Some leftover Twiglets came to the rescue…enough energy to get me to the top!!

…… before the most glorious whoosh back down the other side.

I do keep making the mistake of looking at islands on the map and imagining they are flat. I had not checked….again! Mount Ainos on this little dot of an island (not really!)….rises to 1,628 metres! 1,000 feet higher than Ben Nevis (…and you can cycle up it too!)!

Sami is a sweet wee village….not as pretty somehow as I had expected (‘the prettiest village on Kefalonia’), but lovely all the same.