Wednesday 26th May
I had a long lie-in and woke up mid morning - there was some confusion as to exactly when we got up as we found out later Daz put his watch forward twice during the night!
Daz decided to stay in bed as we had probably missed breakfast anyway. I went for a walk around the boat and found they were still serving breakfast so returned and told Daz. While at breakfast it hit me that we had do do around 160 miles in 3 hours with a knackered bike!
While waiting for the boat to dock in Patras, Greece, we sat talking to the English family we had met the previous night. They were also doing the race across Greece and were equally worried about if they were going to make it. We asked a Greek waiter and he said we'd easily do it, he could make Athens in 90 minutes!
Unfortunately the ferry was late docking, didn't dock until 4pm. We were on the HGV deck and had to wait for all the lorries to get off first, which was a nightmare as it was very warm, the lorries all had their engines running and we had all our gear on. We finally got off the boat at 4:45pm. This left us 1 hour 15 minutes, but we expected we had an extra hour as the Greeks are a bit more lenient about letting late folk onto the ferries.
We set off with me leading so I could set a pace my bike was happy with. It turned out that 90mph was a very jolly speed. The roads were nice and winding to start with, but full of cars and trucks. We were making our own lanes - creating 3 lanes at some points where there was only one! The road opened out and became 2 and 3 lanes. We maintained a very good pace for the first 80-90 miles and made very good progress.
We then pulled off the main road for petrol. The slip road re-joining the main road was a longish u-bend. Following Daz, on the last part of the U, my front wheel slipped. I was convinced the bike was down, but I somehow managed to sit it up. At this point I was heading for a tree. Realising this I tipped the bike in again, hoping I'd scrubbed off enough speed to get me round what was left of the bend. Nope, the front slipped again and this time I was heading for the curb that separated the slip-road from the main road. I knew I couldn't avoid the curb, so I needed to hit it as straight on as I could. I jumped the curb, which was around 2 feet wide, went across all 3 lanes and managed to turn the bike before it hit the central reservation. If there had been anything coming on the main road I'd have been a gonner.
Daz had also had problems with his front-end, but he'd managed to get his bike into the ruts in the road created by the lorries, which held him round. The reason this happened is because of the terrible road surfaces on Greek roads - they are definately the worst roads we came across our entire trip. The tarmac melts and resets with a glassy finish, leaving very little traction, and on top of that is all the dust.
My heart was going ten to the dozen, but we couldn't slow the pace, we had a boat to catch. We were straight back on it - back upto 90mph.
We made it to the town of Piraeus at around 7:00pm - unfortunately the docks were not signed at all and we ended up right in the middle of this town. The streets were all one-way, very narrow with lots of traffic lights. By this time we had adopted the Greek mentality that a red traffic light is more of a recommendation, but it if you want to go through you can! After about 10 minutes of getting more and more lost, I asked a guy and he gave us good directions - it was a good job I asked as we were heading in the totally wrong direction!
We arrived at the docks at around 7:10pm, but were at the wrong end - so we had to ride to the other side of the docks - I had visions of us arriving at the dock and seeing the boat leave! At around 7:15pm we finally found the boat. As we were showing our tickets the English family pulled in behind us - they had just made it too!
The boat left at 8pm - it was a wonderful feeling, after a short but very hard ride, to know we were going to make it to Kos! We had a beer and an early night as we were docking at 4am.