{"id":18112,"date":"2026-01-07T21:10:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T21:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enamonotfp.com\/?p=18112"},"modified":"2026-01-13T21:39:47","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T21:39:47","slug":"taxidia-dromou-os-to-grimsby-kai-piso-8-000chlm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/taxidia-dromou-os-to-grimsby-kai-piso-8-000chlm\/","title":{"rendered":"Road trip (to Grimsby and back 8.000km)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A road trip is an idea.\nA casual \u201cYou know, I\u2019ve heard there\u2019s a little shop selling teapots in the north of England\u2026 shall we go?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, yes!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And just like that, with a foolish sentence, a journey is born.\nA 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\u2019t necessarily include museums or must-see tourist spots. You won\u2019t come back having seen what proper travelers are meant to see.\n\nBut you will have seen plains and beaches, abandoned villages through back roads, places forgotten under the burning sun. You\u2019ll have drunk coffee at gas stations, listened to Malamas \u2014 because on the road the lyric \u201cit\u2019s a useless gift to change your character\u201d carries a different weight. You\u2019ll have lost yourself in thought, swallowing kilometers in silence. You\u2019ll have watched sunsets and moonrises in the middle of nowhere.\n\nSo where are we going now?\nWhat\u2019s the name of this village?\nWe\u2019ll find somewhere to stay for the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s how the journey began, from Athens to Grimsby \u2014 a small seaside town on the northeastern coast of Britain \u2014 with villages and plains and seas and monuments and dirt roads and churches in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ITALY <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In Eboli I met Mr. Pier Paolo, where Christ once stopped. I saw Matera, city of cave dwellers \u2014 a magnificent history of pain \u2014 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.\n\nRock carvings have always moved me \u2014 humanity\u2019s 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\u2019s house \u2014 la casa di Ren\u00e9.\n\nIt is contrasts that make a road trip irresistible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pompeii, 79 AD<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u0397 <\/a>A reminder of the moment \u2014 of fragility, helplessness, and mortality.\nOne single instant, and all beauty, all labor, all display, color, wealth, grace, and breath were surrendered lifeless to eternity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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FRANCE <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four beautiful days. Entire distances traced along country roads \u2014 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.\n\nTurn by turn \u2014 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 \u2014 no need to worry, it says; God knows their names.\n\nAh, and simple crosses \u2014 two nameless pieces of wood for the Germans, twenty years old as well.\n\nA road that leads to the sea. A wild sea, tides breathing in and out. An endless beach that once received tanks, children, dying boys \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An 800-kilometer route through villages of wine and champagne, of boys from the First World War, and of migrants stacked in waiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beaune, Dijon, Reims, Dunkirk, Calais<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ENGLAND <\/p>\n\n\n\n

England will always be the place of my student years. I served my time there as a late adolescent \u2014 and later again as a mother of students, when their turn came. England carries something familiar for me, and there are things \u2014 the so-called \u201cEnglish pleasures\u201d \u2014 that I always enjoy, even if they might mean nothing to anyone else.\n\nFrom 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, \u201cWhat can I do for you, love?\u201d And my beloved bottles, buried in backyards, discovered only by digging.\n\nAnd the countryside \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NETHERLANDS <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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GERMANY - AUSTRIA - SLOVENIA - CROATIA - SERBIA - NORTHERN MACEDONIA because <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It's a long road <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A road trip is an idea, a \u201dI tell you what, I know a tea shop in the north of the<\/p>","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":18150,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18112"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18416,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18112\/revisions\/18416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enamono.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}