We had just finished climbing to the peak of Mount Olympus. It was a journey that we were wholly unprepared for. Equipped with one small backpack (the rest of our gear was left behind, stashed in an unfinished renovated room at a base camp hotel). We had one bottle of water, we had no food, and we had our sunscreen. What else would a man need when climbing to the peak of the largest mountain in Greece? Nevertheless we made it to the top in two days and arrived back at the real world sore, tired, and victorious. From there we traveled to a little place called Meteora.
Meteora is a place where these Greek monks built monasteries up ontop of impossible-to-build-on rocks. There are numbers of these different monasteries, all unique, all a testimony to the hard work, the genius, and the utter stupidity of being a monk back in the day. So the way it works is you go to this little town, buy a good gyro (pronounce it how you will, they pronounced it ‘hero’), purchase a ‘I visited Meteora’ sweatshirt, catch a bus up to the largest and highest elevated monastery, look around, and then go on with your journey. Thats what you’re supposed to do. Here’s what we did…We missed every bus going up the mountain (wrong damn side of the street!), so we walked, and walked, and walked. Did I mention we just hiked up a freaking mountain? So those roads that head up mountains go back and forth, weaving around the mountain in a squwiggly fashion. Finally at one point we got tired of the weaving and decided to venture off the road, down a canyon, through the canyon, up the other side of the canyon, up the rock wall, and into the parking lot of our desired destination. Along the way, however, we found these cool caves filled with bats in the rock wall. They were immediately underneath the large monastery and made us wonder what secret rendevous or prayer sessions happened in these icon filled dark caves. It was while we were searching these caves that we saw a sleeping dog at the end of one long cave. The lighting was poor, so it would be easy to, lets say, mistake a dog for a mountain goat. Before this mistake was made clear to us we had thrown a number of rocks, as boys often do, to try to wake the slumbering animal. -Here’s the scary part- The goat woke up. The goat charged us. The goat put its head down, aimed its horns at us and charged. And charged. And charged. I want to make a point here to say that when a mountain goat charges you, your worst line of defense is to jump up onto a tall precarious rock where you are very uncomfortable and where the mountain grown animal is quite happy. Had we had this information we may have done something else. But we did not. The goat charged at us, us standing on our rock like idiots. The goat jumped at us. Its nostrils flared, its horns glistened, its feet rumbled. And much to our surprise it bounced off the side of the rock, about 1.5 feet infront of where I stood, and it ricochet to the left and down the ravine. We were safe. Wet in the crotch, yet safe.
From there we went to the entrance, put on a dress, looked around, and missed the last bus heading down the mountain…Oh, I forgot to mention that out of some kind of respect thing, everybody has to be covered, so everyone wears some kind of dress or Hammer pants. It’s weird, but it’s part of my life. Anyway, to make a long story only slightly long, we got to hitch a ride back to the town from some old people on a tour bus. It was pretty neat ’cause the tour guide had all sorts of stories to tell about Meteora, the crazy Monks, and Mountain goats.