What do you do when you live a continent away from all your loved ones and you don't want to miss them on Thanksgiving? You go on a BIG hike!
For Thanksgiving weekend, we went to Meteora (central Greece) to hike. The area is beautiful. Meteora is an area, or to be specific, a rock formation in Thessaly (not to be confused with the city we live in: Thessaloniki). Meteora houses the most Greek Orthodox monasteries, and they house them in a very unorthodox way (pun intended): on top of the rock formations! In all, there are 24 monasteries in the area. Only six are still active. While there, we did not go tour any of the monasteries, but we did see several of them up close.
One monastery on the top of the Meteora rock formation.
While in the area of Meteora, we stayed in a little town called Kalabaka. It was super cute and all decked out for Christmas.
The view from our Airbnb.
This area is really neat, geologically. They are not volcanic in nature like all the other similar formations on Earth. Instead, the rocks are a mixture of conglomerate and sandstone. While in Kalabaka, we went to the museum of geology and learned that the conglomerate was formed from deposits from streams over millions of years. About 60 million years ago several movements of the Earth caused a huge deposit of sandstone to also accumulate in the area. It also pushed the sea bed up to create a high plateau. The huge rock pillars were formed by weathering caused by wind, rain, and temperature changes on the faults. This is one of the only places on Earth that has created these types of rock formations this way!
Additionally, they have found remains of human civilizations dating back to 50,000 years ago! The cave where these remains were found used to be open to the public, but now it is closed due to safety concerns, so we didn't get to see it.
We did, however, get to thoroughly enjoy the view, as the main event of our visit was an all day hike! We even took Momo along. 😊
A tiny tree growing alone on one of the plateaus.
Miller posing by the fall colors and cool rock formations.
I found a HUGE leaf that was bigger than my head!
Check out the cool view around us! We had to hike up quite a bit to get the neat view of the mountains, rocks, and monastery behind us!
A nice view from the top.
Another good view. This time of Kalabaka, where we stayed.
Miller by a carving of one of the patron monks of a monastery.
We also made good use of the cafes and restaurants near Kalabaka. One of the cool things about living in Greece is that the restaurants don't care how long you stay. In fact, they fully expect you to spend 2-4 hours just relaxing and talking. This made it perfect for us to relax, eat, warm up, and play some rounds of Phase 10 after all that walking!
Spending the evening at a cafe playing Phase 10.
Momo was pooped too after the walk. Her favorite part was rolling in the leaves.
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