Weekend - another partial success

Well, before I had even managed to set off, the big and most significant disaster - indeed the only one - but one which managed to overshadow the whole weekend, happened.

It was not an uncommon thing to do, to put the GPS receiver on top of the car to get a signal before taking it off the roof again and putting it on the dash board. I had done it often. I had even done it once or twice and left it there only to remember it when it fell onto the bonnet after a change in velocity.

This time, too, I forgot it. Only difference was that it did not bounce off the bonnet in any way so I have no idea where or when it came off the car, and cannot search for it any more than I have done so already since Friday. Bollocks.

I am more annoyed about the stored data in the memory of the thing - all those waypoints from about two years of traveling in the Balkans, Turkey and Norway, and of course all over Greece. A whole bunch of restaurants, museums, things of note (various Byz. Churches in Istanbul, Greece and Macedonia, statues in central squares in towns, bridges, villages and most importantly junctions on dirt roads leading to caves and mountain tops).

Of secondary annoyance was not having any tools with which to record the where the hell all these holes that locals would be showing me while visiting my mum are. So I didn't go chasing holes so much as folklore and stories about holes. I'll write that up straight into Greek for giving to SELAS but might get round to an English language version sometime.

Losing the waypoints sort of brings into focus the whole what it means to travel thing, though. Do I do it to collect waypoints and collect pictures of these places and store them catalogue-like away in some place rarely to be visited except to satisfy the narcissistic need for self-confirmation? Don't know - only ever once have they been useful in getting me back to somewhere in the dark where without the GPS I would have been a little lost. Other than that, I've had fun half heartedly chasing confluences. I guess I can get over having lost all the waypoints.

More later.