We rented a car in Kefalonia. You'll never guess what happened next.

Despite my best efforts, my wife has not yet barred me from the blog. I shall redouble my efforts, which is impossible because I cannot do 2x better than my best. English is full of idiomatic nonsense.

Today I will ramble about getting around Kefalonia, which is an island in Greece. More information about it can be found on Wikipedia. See? I provided you a link this time. What can I say, I'm a hopeless romantic.

HOW DOES THIS EVEN GEAR?

For starters, basically all cars are manual transmission. I have about 15 minutes of training in such a car, so Drea is the one driving all the time. This puts me in the roles of navigator, pusher-of-the-imaginary-brake-pedal-through-the-floor, and looker-around-confused-trying-to-correlate-a-map-and-my-phone-with-reality. Not to toot my own horn (seriously, I can't, I'm riding shotgun), but I am pretty good at that last role. I might add it to my LinkedIn profile.

We went with the simplest rental car option, and we got it. It does not get much more basic than an entry-level Citroen. It served our purposes, however, because there's not really much cause to tear around Kefalonia's roads. I mean, there's the weekly drag races sponsored by the Yakuza, but more about that later.

Half ferry, half turntable,

half bad at fractions

On the right you'll see one of the ferries that runs across the big bay on the island. Unlike Washington state ferries where you disembark (or is it just "bark"?) the opposite end that you embark, these ferries back up and spin around as part of their journey. You can see in the picture how all the cars are entering and having to turn around so that they can leave efficiently.

We used the ferries a fair amount, which I'm proud of as an American tourist, as the last thing I want to do is unfairly ferry in someone else's country.

At least they use Arabic numerals

One of the main things you have to handle when navigating Greece is that the roads signs are not just in another language, they're in another alphabet. The word "alphabet" actually comes from the Greek language, which comes in handy when trying to decipher god-knows-what at 60 KM/hr. For the most part, the road signs on the island had English translations, but every once in awhile you'll find one like on the right.

While I'm on the topic of translation, let me remind you that all figures are in metric. Normally, this is no big deal. However, when you go to pay for gas in €/liter, you basically throw yourself at the mercy of the system and hope you aren't getting ripped off too much.

When you enter Monopolata

Okay, so, then next important thing to know is that Google Maps doesn't really know where anything is, if it exists at all, etc. You have to fall back to an old fashioned map, which is frustrating because no matter how many times you pinch to zoom it in or out, it does not work. On the plus side, the battery never dies.

Once I had gotten us turned around and asked Google to fix it. The roads it told us to navigate were... rustic. Primitive? They were crap. How G even knew there was a road there was impressive, but there was no way to tell it to avoid "roads" that only tractors can safely traverse. We're driving a slightly modernized Model T, for cryin' out loud. The darn thing bottoms out just leaving the driveway.

Letting you know Monopolata

 has been successfully Ghostbusted

Much of the roads once you get out into the country are fairly reminiscent of goat trails. They wind, they saunter, they bend. They switchback. And then they switchback again. There is definitely a sense of them being good enough to use, so they don't bother improving them. I suspect the Greeks rarely over-engineer, and over time I grew to appreciate how the roads moved with the geography instead of overrode it.

Everywhere you do not see this

sign, presume it's there anyway

A big part of the goat trail-ness is the continual fluctuation between 1 and 2 lane widths. Usually these narrow sections are around blind corners because no one wants to see their own death coming. When approaching, it is customary to slow down and honk the horn briefly to let anyone who might be around the bend know that you're about to hit them. I mock this system, honestly, because it is way more effective than it should be. Over time, you tire of warning nonexistent people and honk less frequently until you nearly run someone over.

Occasionally, you will have to yield to a herd of goats or sheep. I don't know my farmyard animalry well enough to tell you which. Maybe both? The point is, some of the roads feel like goat paths because they are goat paths.

A fractured road and a crane that

they just left to fall someday

One of the charming things about Kefalonia is that it gets earthquakes fairly regularly. We got to experience the quaint local custom of momentary panic induced by the world shifting and reminding you that it's not nearly as rock solid as the rocks it's made of. About 2 years ago, they had an earthquake that damaged a bunch of the roads. Most of the damage is repaired where "repaired" means "you can use the road in some not terrible fashion". A lot of the narrowed sections of roads are due to this damage.

If you can handle all these things, then views like the below are to be found around the island. Resist the urge to rubberneck, though, because it might be the day of that Yakuza drag race that I mentioned I would talk about later.