We went to bed a little later than usual last night. We enjoyed a sunset session from one of the viewpoints above Meteora, then drove down into Kastraki and had a late dinner at a local pub. The Gyros continue to be pork or chicken only, no sign of lamb anywhere.

Despite the late-ish night, we still wanted to be up for sunrise at one of the overlooks. We got up around 6:00 and headed up into the hills/rocks. It was nice, but it wasn’t magical like the previous night had been. Part of that is probably because the newness of the view was starting to wear off, but the real difference was the lack of clouds. People underestimate the value of clouds when taking landscape photos.

After sunrise we drove back down to the hotel for breakfast, which was really good. The had a buffet setup. In order to keep things safer, they required everyone wear masks (which is always required in the public areas of the hotel), but they also put out plastic gloves to wear while accessing the buffet. I was pretty impressed by that, and even more impressed with the food. I’m sure I ate too much, but I knew we had a big day ahead of us.

The Monasteries of Meteora

After breakfast we headed back up into the rocks to visit the various monasteries built atop some of the spires overlooking the town. They were each built by different people at different times. At one point there were at least 24 of them, but now they’re down to just 6. It’s pretty amazing to see how they were built and how they were able to defend them against everything.

This is the off season, and it’s a covid year, so there are far fewer people here than normal. And yet, every monastery parking lot filled up and many of the narrow winding roads had cars parked up and down them everywhere near anything remotely interesting. Monasteries drew the most cars, followed by nunneries, and then overlooks. There were also some cars parked randomly at places that didn’t seem to be interesting, but I’m far from an expert. It made for a slow journey through the back roads.

We got a good parking lot at the Holy Monastery of Grand Meteoron, which was one of the first to open. They require all women to wear skirts “for modesty” even if they are already wearing pants. They had a stack of skirts for women to borrow on their way in and a different place to drop them on your way out. Both Charmaine and Jess had to borrow a skirt in order to visit the monastery. Inside the monastery, they had a bunch of old things that the monks had preserved over the years, including books and bibles from the 900s. That’s just amazing to me. Of course, they don’t allow any photos or videos of their amazing documents and treasures.

Parking had gone crazy by the time we were done touring that first one, so we decided to leave the car parked there and just walk to the next one. It was much smaller, but still very cool. The second one didn’t have a stack of skirts to borrow, but they were conveniently selling the same skirts for about $3 each. Charmaine and Jess each bought one. They were surprisingly concerned about getting a good one, even though they’ll never wear them again. I found that amusing. They wore their new skirts at all the other monasteries and nunneries we visited that day.

Balance

I don’t know what is more amazing to me: the rock formations or the monasteries. There’s a really interesting balance between the two, and they’re all great to go see. It’s not a huge area and there just isn’t that much to see. We were mostly done by lunch time, so we headed back down to town. Kastraki is really small and really only has a few pubs to choose from, so we decided to drive to the other side of the rocks to the bigger town of Kalambaka where we found more chicken gyros (still no lamb), smoothies, and some mastic and pink pepper ice cream.

After lunch we went back to the hotel and relaxed a bit before heading back up to an overlook for sunset. There were still no clouds in the sky, which made for a bland sunset compared to yesterday, but it was still fun to watch all the other people scrambling for pictures. We tried not to stay out too late because we have to leave really early in the morning (before our hotel breakfast even starts) in order to get back to Athens in time for our flight to Santorini.