For about forty years I have teased my sister T about how when travelling on the bus from Ioannina to Metsovo she was always sick numerous times. Poor girl she was just not a great traveller. But I think, having just done that journey it is time to say sorry.
The roads, she will be delighted to know, have got better thanks to the EU money, aka your taxes folks, that used to be sent by the lorry load to Greece. There are now two tunnels through mountains that cut out miles of winding on loop after loop around mountains. I reckon what is now a 55 kilometre trip must have been 70 back in the day. And the journey lasted a mere ninety minutes which must be an hour shorter than it was in the 1970s.
But the roads are still bloody windy. The 1000 foot sheer drop as you climb above the plains of Ioannina at the start and look down on the vast lake with its sprawling reed banks and that charming island, where some mythical princess was imprisoned and left to die but where I have always wanted to go and never gone, made me feel queasy and the sharp bends and loop after loop were a tad unsettling.
I was not sick but thinking back to those hot summer days with a cranky old bus smelling of T's sick, I think her vomiting was more than understandable.