Before getting on to todays report I want you to look at the photo of the green truck in yesterdays photos and note the seating position of the driver. We thought our Unimog was pretty smart with its variopilot which allows the steering wheel and pedals to be moved to the other side of the cab to make the truck right hand drive. Well the tug trucks that move trailers around the port of Patra go one better; they can actually turn the driving position around so that they don't have to reverse with mirrors.
We got quite a surprise at the end of the days ferry journey today. While waiting near the boats reception area for the completion of docking I got an email on my phone saying that some friends of ours (Gary and Monika Wescott) had changed their plans and were in Ancona waiting for a ferry of their own. Sure enough as we drove off the ferry and through the gate there were Monika and Gary waving at us to pull over. They quickly showed us to the ferry waiting area where they were parked and we got down to some serious catching up and wine tasting. Gary and Monika are traveling in the oposite direction to us, from Europe to China and hence we had a lot of exchanging of information to do.
After a long session of talking we were interrupted by one of the security guards who told us that we could not spend the night in the waiting area but that we could park in the street with the "other trucks" a few hundred yards away. So thats what we did, and that brought the evenings catching-up to an end.