Greece - Day 11 (Fri. 9/6/24)

 Here's the hotel we stayed at last night with the monasteries in the background: 

Breakfast at the hotel, and then a full day of activities, the first of which was driving to these amazing rock formations on which, incredibly, people have built monasteries. We toured the Holy Monastery of Grand Meteoron.

Some of our group climbing some of the stairs to the monastery.

So many treacherous places to put your feet in Greece. Monastery day was not the worst of my footwear choices, but not the best either. I was wearing water shoes.

Inside the monastery (Why do all these men have such skinny noses?)

Another monastery. It blew my mind to ponder how they could build these at that time on this terrain.

  I wish we would have had a guide here. I had so many questions. Here I am pondering some of them and having a chat with Jesus. There's something sanctified about this place. It's quite literally set apart. I can see why the monks chose this location to spend all their time in contemplative prayer.

Our next stop was a waterfall, which I loved. You could walk right up to it, go behind it, and view it from all angles. Here's Mike and I behind it, before I walked right up to it and got soaked from the powerful spray. 

It felt good on that hot, humid day.

                         And here we are with Nikos after I got soaked. 

Then we drove to our friend Pam's family's village, where her uncle gave us a hayrack ride tour of the farm fields. They grow an amazing variety of crops in Greece. Uncle Jim gave us a very informative and interesting tour. One of the highlights was when our friend Bob got smacked in the face with a tree branch he didn't see coming.

Someone captured the moment where I bruised my knee so hard that it's still tender and discolored two weeks later.

We were out in the fields until after dark. Uncle Jim gave us some fresh fruit, and we went to our hotel to get a little sleep before tomorrow's adventure.