Recently I made a story about picking olives.

Now here's how the olives are processed into oil:

It's not you romantic medieval rubbing of stones, but a pure high tech procedure full of
machinery, sensores, displays and buttons. It produces oil of outstanding quality, and we
were happy to take it and finally feel ready to leave greece. A working holiday it has been!


After delivering the Olives they first go through a weighing (250 kg!), sorting and washing process...


...to then be brought to the machinery...


...to be cut into mush by those terrible knifes. All this is controlled via the panel...


...but sometimes still running hot...


...but no worries, Giorgos is in control and allows the centrifuge to start it's job...


...which is the huge elephant in the room...


...that shits pisses extracts the essence. 33 liters!

This is the third part of the 3500km Travel Trilogy, of which you
can find the first part (which is the end) here, and the second part (picking olives) here

About the Trip



We slept the last four days in four different countries; all in all we crossed
8 countries during 3500km. This all to spend 3 days in Greece, making
our own olive oil. Plus another 4 days sitting at the Greek seaside,
impatiently watching our boredom grow and things getting stuck.

When we finally decided to hit the road a few days early things started rolling again.

And not just a little bit!

Everything felt like on a good acid trip as we kept slowly cruising on a long road to home.
Entering Bulgaria and crossing a mountain pass through deep red autumn forests kicked
in high & hard. Followed by a small down, passing through trash-villages all the way to the
Romanian border; and after crossing it, a sudden up: Everything is made with love and care;
colours, playfulness and a taste for living well.

Then on across Hungary, spoilt with food and friendlyness, even though it comes wrapped in a language from outer space...

Then, while starting to come down, we arrived home. It embraced us warmly with soft
autumn hues, our cat Sissi, plus three new kitties, our food and garden, our stash of
smokeables, our sofa, bed and internet.

We did realize that we are different than most of the people. As we don't work in the
sense of wage labour, we don't need holidays in the usual sense of the word.
We travel for different reasons! So we established a few guidelines for future trips:

For 'holidays' it's best to stay at home
For travel it's good to follow a project
It's not us sitting on the seaside in Greece doing fuck all