This morning we needed to find fuel and money so we used our trusty OSM map to pick a group of banks in the city of Thessoliniki and headed that way. Unfortunately the road system defeated us and we passed by our targeted banks on a limited access road with no way to get to our targets. A further check of the map identified a Shell station at the entrance to a small town called Chalastra so that was our next hope, and indeed it worked. Diesel for 1.355 Euro per liter (about $6.80/gallon). Also the owner would accept credit cards, spoke English and has a brother that lives in Canberra. We suspect we will meet a lot of people in Greece with relatives in Australia.

After the fuel we drove to the town entrance and spent a pleasant hour walking around the town center. It certainly was not a place for our truck but was otherwise modern and pleasant. We got some money (yeh!), bought bread, had coffee and cake before walking back to the truck and getting underway.

Our plan for the day had been to head directly to the town of Vergina (pronounced Ver-geeena for the giggling school boys among us) which has a museum and ruins from the period of Phillip II (BC 359-336) before we were distracted by the hunt for fuel and money. So with full tank and pockets, we got back onto that plan.

Driving down the narrow main street of Vergina we thought we had made a mistake by bringing the truck into the town center and were about to turn around when a sign advertising parking for buses came to our rescue. The owners quickly materialized after we pulled in and in short order we had organized to stay for the night, to get electricity, water and internet (though the signal was not strong enough for us to use from the truck).

With camping organized we walked to the museum which was dug into and under a hill. We learned that the hill was called a Tumulus and was constructed over the tombs of a number of prominent local rulers to separate the dead from the living. Inside the museum it took 20 minutes for our eyes to accommodate to the almost non-existent light. It seems that the museum is kept very dark to provide "a sense of awe and suggests the atmosphere of the land of the dead". The museum actually houses the remains of a number of tombs including a couple that are still intact, though for those only the entrances are visible. In addition there ware many gold relics on display.