Three Summers: Zen and the art of motor...car maintenance

Since we collected her from Paris in late March, Cecile has behaved beautifully. She's swift and sporty, comfortable and small enough to navigate narrow streets in hilltop towns. We have, however, had two episodes which required some maintenance - tyre maintenance - a blow-out on the autopista in Spain, and a puncture in far-eastern Greece on our way to the Turkish border.

The blow-out in Spain was curious (it was early April, so the tyre was only 2 weeks old) we didn't hit anything, just felt the tyre 'go'. We were able to safely stop at the side of the autopista and we set about changing the tyre. Conveniently we had stopped beside a roadside assist telephone and by pressing a button our location was sent to a monitoring centre. Within 10 minutes two obliging Spaniards arrived to see if everything was OK. It was, and we continued on our way to our booked destination where it was our good fortune to find that the local Beaurepaire dealer was only a kilometre away and he was able to order the replacement and have it delivered overnight from Valencia. By 10 the next morning the ordered tyre had arrived as promised and was fitted to Cecile. Smart, new, stylish Cecile had a new, expensive piece of Spanish footwear - 240E.

The second incident - a puncture - was caused by an unknown object picked up in the gravel car park of the roadside restaurant we had stopped at. We had left the restaurant, and were heading back onto Egnatia Odos, when it was apparent something was not right.

Like a formula one pit crew we had the tyre off and the spare installed. See the photo below which may have accounted for some of our speed! Back on the road we travelled on a few kilometres to the first exit where we saw a welcomed Beaurepaire sign in the distance. The Greek proprietor was sitting on a stool in the shade swinging his worry beads as we drove up. Within 10 minutes he had the wheel off, puncture repaired and wheel replaced. This time Cecile's Greek footwear repair cost the grand sum of 10E!

Egnatia Odos is the national road that runs from the west coast of Greece all the wayeast to the Turkish border, some 700 kilometres. Egnatia Odos means "roman road" and the route follows the old roman road that was the backbone of trade between the east and west. It's impressive engineering, a total of 50 kilometers are underground through successive tunnels under the Pindus Mountains. Along a section in central Greece were signs warning caution as here you can find the endangered brown bear. We didn't realise there were brown bears in Greece! And were disappointed not to see any.

We twice travelled the entire length of the Egnatia Odos; staying overnight at the Agean seaside town of Kavala on our way to Turkey, and on our return trip to the Greek Islands of the Ionian Sea we stopped at Alexandroupoli and Meteora.

These days the weather is only ever hot, clear and sunny and we have realised that this Mediterranean climate is very much to our liking!