Fire

 If you've been watching the news over the past 9 days you would have seen that parts of Greece have turned to ash.  The wild fires are slowly being extinguished but not before they've burnt houses, olive trees, vineyards, shops, livestock and hundreds of thousands of acres of forest.  Turkey is burning, neighbours Albania and Bulgaria are in flames.  We've had endless high temperatures which has turned the earth and everything on it to a brittle brown stubble that is tinder dry.  Most of the forests are pine, highly flammable.  Pine cones can explode and be projected 50 yards to start new fires.

We've had help from all over the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, the Middle East, Israel, Qatar and Kuwait and many  European countries.      Russia sent three gigantic firefighting planes.  Two of them can carry 110 tons of water and refill in 15 minutes.  

Now the rains have begun.  Late this afternoon thunder rumbled around us and we had 10 minutes of very heavy rain. Our garden got a good drenching.

  The island of Evia where the worst fires are still burning will have rain tomorrow.  Hopefully it's enough to dampen the flames but there will be high winds again too.  

On our island there are groups of volunteers doing a 24 hour fire patrol and everyone coming up the mountain after dark is subject to a check.  You're allowed up if you live here, like us, or want to eat at the taverna at the top of the hill.  Otherwise the mountain and it's forests are out of bounds after dark.

Tonight the perseid meteor shower should be at it's peak but there is a lot of cloud here.  My daughter is having a picnic on their roof and keeping an eye out for these meteors which come streaking across the sky at this time of the year.  It can be quite a show if you're lucky enough to catch them.