Epirus - Part dio

So.....After sleeping on the indescribable beach at the base of impossible stairs we wandered the beach most of the day - playing with random objects that had washed ashore, swimming, sleeping, even doing a little beach yoga.  After the place got crowded (about 8 people showed up over the course of the day) we took off and headed for the mainland.

We got a little disoriented when we left the islands and ended up a little lost but stumbled upon a spring with "magical" water.  We followed the signs from the middle of nowhere to what we thought might be a tourist trap but it turned out to be more of a local thing.  We came across a long line of locals waiting to fill hundreds of litres worth of old ouzo and water bottles with the water pouring out of the spring.  We emptied our own bottles and refilled with the "magical" water.  One guy was even filling his radiator with spring water!

From there we raced up to Ionnina - a university town which is also the capital of Epirus.  It was a little shocking coming into a lively town at first but we finally found a place to park, changed clothes on the street and set out in search of somewhere to eat for Hana's birthday.  We happened upon a good looking bar and restaurant set back from the street.  The entire menu was in greek so we decided to just ask for whatever was good and would feed the four of us.  When we proposed this to the waiter we discovered he didn't speak English and he quickly disappeared to get someone who did.  As our luck would have it, the only staff member who spoke English was the head chef!!  After confirming that we would eat anything he cooked, he went back to the kitchen and fixed us an oversized meal of calamari, octopus, pork, steak, chicken, salad, fries, rice, bread, little ham and cheese things and even brought us an extra caraf of wine on the house!  We left sometime around midnight after eating way too much.  As our food comas set in we abandoned our initial plan of going out on the town (we probably would have been turned away from most bars due to our appearance anyway) and instead opted for shared ice-cream treats from a little kiosk.  We sat in the park somehow finding room in our bellies for chocolate covered ice-cream on a stick and graham cracker sandwhiches and then set out for a place to sleep.  The castle we had hoped to sleep in turned out to be a little town within the castle walls so we instead headed to the only dark spot in town and slept the night on a perfect hill that overlooked the entire town.  We slept like babies despite a little rain in part thanks to a shared (small) bottle of absinthe in celebration of Hana's birthday. 

The next day we hit the bakery and grocery store to stock up on chocolate, peanut butter and bread and headed for the mountains...