Chris takes up the story...

 

Thank you to Takis from the Parakopi garage in Syros, who with his brother, helped get Aimile ready for the journey

It took us 7 days to get to London , minus a day off exploring with my friends. The biggest take away is how well Aimile is performing. OK we are not super fast. We were cruising at 80 kph and to start with the trucks would roar past, leaving us swaying in the wash from the slip stream, until we learnt to surf their wake and our speed increased to 90 kph and the petrol consumption dropped to an amazing 19.5 kilometers to the liter, or 55 mpg. 

It has not been all plain surfing. It almost didn't start at all, when Blue Star decided to cancel our ferry off the island due to bad weather. Fortunately we managed to switch our  booking to the trusty Artemis which goes to a pot on the tip of Attica. Exiting the boat at 5 pm we had to get to Patras for 23.00 to catch the next ferry. Aimile began to show us what she was capable of. We arrived by 21.30 having stopped at a superstore in Athens to buy snow chains. It took 3 circuits of Patras to find the Anek Office to check-in, nothing to do with Jacky's navigarting.  Anek seem allergic to putting up signs to guide customers to their ferry quay. Also there was no ferry as it was 5 hours late. Jacky and I shivered on a huge wind and rain swept quay until 4 in the morning before being allowed to board the boat. We crawled into our bunks and passed out.

The trip is 2 nights and a whole day supposedly arriving at 10.00 in the morning, with one stop at Igoumenitsa opposite Corfu. Having taken on mainly trucks from Northern Greece, we continued out into the channel between Corfu and Albania and the engine stopped and the lights went out and we drifted to a halt. Panic might have been an understandable response, but the crew didn't turn a hair and lolled about nonchalently. Clearly this was not the first time this had happened. After about half an hour we gradually started to make forward progress and it took about an hour to get back up to full speed, with lights. The weather had gone from beautiful sunshine on the rugged Albanian coast to over-cast and the wind was rising. 

We turned in to be awoken by the pitching of the boat and thuds of lashing spray. We were pounding into a force 7 gale. The scene at first light was gruesome. Wind was smashing the tops off the waves and throwing spume around, forming almost a fog. We were already 5 hours behind schedule and bashing into the wind we were dropping further behind. We finally got off the boat at 17.00 as it was going dark. 

There were precious little formalities. A couple of Italian Border Police waved us over. A big guy looking very stern inquired where we were going. Jacky replied 'London" after a brief double take he cracked up laughing, and wished us "good luck". It was a fairly long run due west for 6+ hours. All being well that would put us at my friends in after 11.00 at night. The Italian toll roads are very good and we made fast progress. When I checked in, I was told their daughter had cooked a cake specially and was waiting up for us, so we cracked on.  Aimile hummed along and we managed to arrive at 10.30 to greeted by very excited animals and humans.