3. The Long and Winding Road

Our man with a van has delivered goods all over Greece and when loading was finished we asked his advice about our proposed route. We intended taking the new motorway, which runs along the southern edge of the Gulf of Corinth, and continuing onward to the bridge over the gulf near Patra and then heading north to Parga. However, he pointed out to us that, as we had no real deadline to keep to, we could consider taking the roads north of the gulf as they were much quieter and the scenery was more varied and interesting. Although this would take longer we decided that we could take the opportunity to see more of our soon to be adopted country of residence.
The delay with the hire car at the airport meant that we were joining the motorway at the height of the Athens rush hour. Now this is not for the faint hearted. The Greeks have the worst road death rates in the EEC, and it doesn't take many minutes of driving amongst the Athens commuters to realise why. I quickly decided to choose a lane and stay there no matter what speed the traffic did (10kph rapidly becomes 80kph in the space of 100 metres!); and ignore the waving of arms and horns sounding all around us.
Before our story continues I must take the opportunity to give due praise to the layout and engineering of this excellent piece of road construction. It is superbly signposted (in Greek and English) even down to the name of the street you will join at junctions and, the volume of MOVING traffic that it carries is very impressive compared to UK motorways.
We easily found our exit and within half an hour we were well clear of the Athens suburbs and heading off into the countryside. All went went well until about 9.20am. We approached a T junction near a town called Thiva where we were to turn left to head west along the northern edge of the gulf. We were immediately behind two very large articulated flatbed HGV's who were turning right, and because of the narrowness of the junction, they had to move well over to the left to make the turn in one go. As the second HGV cleared the junction I moved forward near to the centre of the road preparing to make the left turn when I saw the real reason for their wide turn. Immediately in front of me there were the remains of a traffic island, a few bits of kerb guarding a 2-3ft deep hole!!
My reactions were quick enough to avoid a nose dive but, in that fraction of a second, my concentration on driving on the right hand side of the road deserted me, I allowed the car to roll too far out of the junction, and was promptly sideswiped by an oncoming car!!!!
Things had just got a whole lot worse..................................continued above.