...Mountain Kitheronas (29 May 2010)

The weather was kind of hot. I was at home, fooling around with my HF tranceiver in hopes of fixing it.The phone rang. It was Sakis on the other side. "let's do something dude." he said. "Like what?" i said. "Let's go to Kitheronas mountain. I just pick my car up from Rover service and i think it's time to check it out. Are you gonna come or what?"
Half an hour later i was outside Resenda Pastry-Shop. Peter, one of the owner, would come with us also. Nick, (the other owner) would stay back to run the store.Great!
So, we all packed in the car and hit the road.
Few hours later we were at the foot of the mountain.
At the top there's a former American military base. I'm sure, it was great when the base was active, but now it's just a pile of debris.
The view is more than great. From up there you can see a big part of the western Corinthian gulf, a lot of Kopaida flatland and a part from Eleysina, Salamina and Saronikos gulf. You can see clearly the 3 big mountain that hugging Athens. Parnitha, Penteli and Imitos. What a great place for telecommunication military base! I've been there once more a couple a years ago, as a HAM, during Aegean VHF Contest.
Well, we were at the top but we were not alone. A huge fleet of ladybirds took off from the grass and thousands of coleoptera was flying around and among us like they wanted to say welcome. They were landing wherever they wanted to. Arms, legs, eyes, sunglasses,necks,noses,t-shirts were fine runways for them. I've never seen something like this before. It was like a big cloud full of ladybirds. We were throwing them out politely. They were 'ladies' after-all, you know.

Anyway, i took my handheld transceiver and start scanning for repeaters and links.
Petros was enjoying the view while Sakis taking pictures. Ladybirds were still using us as their personal airports.





That heavy air traffic pissed us off and we decided to go somewhere else. Somewhere away from there. Anywere but there. So we all 3 said the same word. Parnitha.
We took the way back...we took some dirt roads full of gravels , we powered on the GPS tracking and about an hour later we were at the foot of the Parnitha. There was good and bad news on the air for us. Good news: We got maps. Bad news: We did not have the right map. We just had a general map of the area with no details at all. But you know something? We got time. So, we decided to go forward. And then we were lost. What's the best thing you can do when you are sooo lost in the woods? Take a picture. That's what we did. "The loosers" The "Tres Hermanos" full of pride posing in front of the Rover.
We were running out of time , out of water, out of humor, we were starving but we were lucky. Couple of miles later we found a farmer who saw us the right way to go back.
When we hit the main road we found a fire truck. We asked the fire man where we could find the best place to eat something. He tell us to go to a taverna 500 meters away. Everything was great but the olive oil. It was like an engine oil. We knew that if we ate this bloody oil we were going to be the new Transformers with an extra head, 3 legs, 5 eyes with no eyelashes and 5 collar-bones instead of fingers. So we asked the owner to bring us a new fresh salad and olive oil to started over again.
We ate well, we had great time, we were happy and then we were home.
We are gonna do that again.
See you over here dudes, at this blog .
kou-gou

p.s.: After all these ladybirds i don't wanna listen to "The Beatles" anymore.