Road trip (to Grimsby and back 8.000km)

A road trip is an idea. A casual “You know, I’ve heard there’s a little shop selling teapots in the north of England… shall we go?”

“Well, yes!”

And just like that, with a foolish sentence, a journey is born. A journey open to surprise, open to adventure. No booked rooms. Just miles and music. Turn here, it looks nice. Wrong turns. Sudden revelations. Chance encounters. A road trip is exactly what the words say: it is road. It doesn’t necessarily include museums or must-see tourist spots. You won’t come back having seen what proper travelers are meant to see. But you will have seen plains and beaches, abandoned villages through back roads, places forgotten under the burning sun. You’ll have drunk coffee at gas stations, listened to Malamas — because on the road the lyric “it’s a useless gift to change your character” carries a different weight. You’ll have lost yourself in thought, swallowing kilometers in silence. You’ll have watched sunsets and moonrises in the middle of nowhere. So where are we going now? What’s the name of this village? We’ll find somewhere to stay for the night.

That’s how the journey began, from Athens to Grimsby — a small seaside town on the northeastern coast of Britain — with villages and plains and seas and monuments and dirt roads and churches in between.

ITALY

In Eboli I met Mr. Pier Paolo, where Christ once stopped. I saw Matera, city of cave dwellers — a magnificent history of pain — and learned that its name does not come from mother, as I had believed, but from meteora, the suspended. Suspended lives of poor people, hanging somewhere between life and death, I thought, kilometer by kilometer, through endless fields of wheat stacked for winter. Rock carvings have always moved me — humanity’s first attempt at art. Inside these caves, you see Madonnas painted with natural pigments, gazing at you unchanged through centuries, even as fragments. And then, in the middle of the road, a graffiti of Madonnas. And in the upper neighborhood, Irene’s house — la casa di René. It is contrasts that make a road trip irresistible.

Pompeii, 79 AD

Η A reminder of the moment — of fragility, helplessness, and mortality. One single instant, and all beauty, all labor, all display, color, wealth, grace, and breath were surrendered lifeless to eternity.

FRANCE

Four beautiful days. Entire distances traced along country roads — sunflower fields to the left, wheat fields to the right. Roads not even marked on maps, villages that seem never to have known a tourist. Seductive clouds traveling beside us, almost within reach, and then suddenly the cemeteries of the Great War. Turn by turn — twenty-year-old boys, turned into soil far from the edges of their own lands, planted here in endless fields according to origin: the British here, the Australians there, further down the Poles and the Canadians. And the unknown — no need to worry, it says; God knows their names. Ah, and simple crosses — two nameless pieces of wood for the Germans, twenty years old as well. A road that leads to the sea. A wild sea, tides breathing in and out. An endless beach that once received tanks, children, dying boys — and today gently touches refugees and migrants who surrender themselves on Sundays to a breeze and sunlight. Little children with plastic buckets, mothers with headscarves and food containers.

An 800-kilometer route through villages of wine and champagne, of boys from the First World War, and of migrants stacked in waiting.

Beaune, Dijon, Reims, Dunkirk, Calais

ENGLAND

England will always be the place of my student years. I served my time there as a late adolescent — and later again as a mother of students, when their turn came. England carries something familiar for me, and there are things — the so-called “English pleasures” — that I always enjoy, even if they might mean nothing to anyone else. From jumble sales, jacket potatoes, the silly fish and chips and buttered toasted bread, to the kind grandmothers ready to answer any question you ask, the butcher who says in a deep voice, “What can I do for you, love?” And my beloved bottles, buried in backyards, discovered only by digging. And the countryside — that languid English countryside with its greens and flowers, just a step away from the sea, which comes and goes, leaving behind endless stretches of bare sand in the blink of an eye.

NETHERLANDS

GERMANY - AUSTRIA - SLOVENIA - CROATIA - SERBIA - NORTHERN MACEDONIA because

It's a long road