Today we slept in a little bit and after breakfast were excited to hear that Grande Meteora, the largest of the six active monasteries in Meteora, was open! We started off our trip with a visit to Agios Nicholas (270 steps), one of the lowest by elevation of the monasteries and possibly our least favorite out of all of them. It had nice views, but the inside wasn't the nicest.

We were not deterred though, so we climbed up to Roussanou (190 steps), our first monastery for nuns. After walking up the stairs you have to walk a somewhat rickety looking bridge over a ravine to get to the monastery. It is on a beautiful rock that triangulates a couple of the other monasteries, as well as spectacular views over Kastraki and up to the mountain range behind it. It was a smaller monastery, but the gardens were beautiful and quite intricate in design.

Next, we ventured up to Grande Meteora. The guides say that you have to climb 300 stairs to get to the top, what they don't tell you is that first you have to go down about 100, so on your way out you have to go up again! Regardless, it stood up to its name and it was so large it was difficult to determine if we had explored all of the chapels, displays and museums that they featured. They had various rooms set up like small museums so you could see old fashioned tools for wine making and storage, the ancient kitchen had cooking pots and utensils on display as well as the wood fired oven and hearth. It seemed more like a small town or compound once you were up there. Once we were pretty sure we had seen it all, we made our way back to the car and drove to the next monastery on our list, Verlaam. There were 3+ tour buses in the parking area, so we decided to take a break and go back to our hotel for a bit to see if the tour buses died down a bit in the afternoon.

After our break we headed back to Verlaam (150 steps) and at least one of the tour buses was pulling out as we were heading in! We got there just in time to enjoy a peaceful break in the crowds and had the panoramic veranda almost to ourselves. It was spectacular! The architecture was so impressive, and the fact that it was sitting perched precariously on the top of a rock made it even more so. All of the landscaping was beautifully manicured and it quickly became our favorite of the monasteries that we had seen so far (5 of 6). We headed down to their museum and it was extremely well done in both English and Greek. It answered some of the questions we had about how the monks lived in the monasteries early on, what a typical day in the life of a monk consisted of, and much more. Our favorite was a short silent movie created in 1924 of a monk putting himself in a net at the bottom of the mountain, and attaching the net to a hook, that was then hoisted up to the top of the mountain by three other monks using a manual winch around a huge post at the top of the monastery! You couldn't have paid me to get into something like that!!

After Verlaam, we decided to just run over to our sixth and final monastery, St. Nikolas Anapafsas another that was inhabited by nuns. This one required no steps, and it was clear it was the favorite with the large tours. When we arrived there were at least 6 buses in the parking area, but we were still able to find a parking spot! We ventured in and the monastery was nice, but seemed like it was a bit more modernized or perhaps "touched up" a bit more than the others. The views were unique to the others because instead of looking over Meteora, the rock forest, it looked over the surrounding town and countryside. It was a beautiful view! We quickly got overwhelmed by hundreds of people coming off of tour buses and figured that was our queue to leave. When we got out to the car there were at least 12 tour buses trying to squeeze onto the end of a very small road. We were parked in and had to wait for some buses to play a bit of Tetris before we could make our escape!

By this point it was about 4pm and we hadn't eaten lunch so we decided to just eat an early dinner. We stopped at Valia Calda, a restaurant that has been around for 5 generations. It was right downtown Kalambaka, and the sun was still shining so we sat outside. We enjoyed a Greek salad, Kevin's new favorite, and some local homemade sausages. It was all spectacular!

We made our way back to the hotel for a bit of reading and relaxing before heading back to the top of the mountains for the sunset. We stopped at a different vantage point than last night, but it was overcast again so unfortunately we didn't have much color in the sky. We headed back to the hotel to download some pictures, play a bit of cribbage and pack up since tomorrow is another travel day. Overall, we really enjoyed Meteora. It's like no place we have ever been and the way that history was enmeshed in this truly unique landscape was awe-inspiring!