When the first cave man left his cave to search for food he probably got lost. Having spent the night in the wild with Sabre Toothed tigers and such he no doubt learned from this experience. On his next foray into the wilds he may have dragged a stick behind him to leave a mark in the ground thinking that would guide him back to his humble hole in a rock. This certainly worked until it rained. Eventually he drew charcoal pictures on the cave wall mapping out various landmarks like, big rock that looks like Mammoth…. hmm…..Mammoth Rock. To augment the map he added  potential food sources like Cronopio dentiacutus, which is in fact a prehistoric squirrel with big teeth (not unlike the one in the Ice Age movie). Starting to put A and B together now, Cave Man realises that by drawing pictures on bark he can take his “map” with him and by orienting the map with the location of the sun he can find all the Cronopio dentiacutus he needs and more importantly the cave. This important breakthrough was the start of  navigation as we know it. Moving forward man develops the compass, topographic maps, geometry, celestial navigation and the ultimate tool “The Global Positioning System” or G.P.S.. Originally Navstar GPS, G.P.S. is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Air Force. This system is deadly accurate (often within 30 cm). I mention all this because armed with this cutting edge technology we were confident of finding our evening’s accommodation, but could our G.P.S. find the La Munte Hotel in Anilio Greece, oh no that was beyond it, much to difficult. Worse was yet to come, seeing as we hadn’t had much call for our bark map paintings in recent times we foolishly left them at home, so we had no backup plan to find the La Munte Hotel in Anilio Greece. What we did find were lots of goat trails, shear cliffs and even a ski trail at the top of a mountain ridge which necessitated some serious cursing to facilitate extrication of car and occupants. On top of this it would seem the Greek roads up in the hills out of the tourist route are not as well maintained as they could be in fact some are slipping down the mountain in big slabs. I’m rambling here a bit, so to cut to the end game, we did find the La Munte Hotel in Anilio Greece, this was achieved by the old age method of “dumb luck” but not before I managed, without any outside assistance from either G.P.S. or bark maps not only demonstrate a complete lack of orienteering skill but also to create a new under body shape to our not very old and now not so straight Hyundai station wagon…. not pleased, not pleased at all. But hey, like Garry said at least it’s now got more ground clearance!

One good thing did come of our map-less wanderings. We located who we think to be Garry’s Greek relatives…. the long lost and almost forgotten Lalaloupsis. It appears they now run a fantastic little Taverna in Anilio that serves the best Greek salad and grilled lamb dishes in town (I know what you’re thinking, it’s the only Taverna in town…..wrong there are at least 2 others but they were closed). So here are a couple of pictures of Anilio, the revised Hyundai, and most importantly………….”the relatives”.

View from hotel.

Modified Hyundai

Garry eating lamb like a Lalaloopsi.

Potential Relatives?

By the way, I should mention that we are unable to positively state that the people pictured above are in fact the Lalaloopsi family members that Kerry insists actually exist. Our inability to speak Greek and their total lack of English skills may have led to some confusion concerning both menu selection and genealogy, plus we had had a couple of carafes of some quite fruity local red liquid which I suspect may have contained at least some alcohol. Lovely people though and not just relatively speaking.