A fairground life(cyprus adventure ch17)

End of Strovolos March 1999
The last week of Strovolos was spent getting ready to pack up and shift. The twist ride owned by “a” was going home. “a” sourced some empty 200 ltr barrels and stored them on his ride and filled them with fuel for getting from London to Glasgow.( fuel in Cyprus was only 25c a litre). We all thought this was a great idea and before long we all had barrels packed into the rides. The last day “c” decided to take the roof cover off the dodgems to quicken the pull down time. What a blunder, sunny Cyprus rained that afternoon and the dodgem cars would not go around the track, they just skidded on the floor. Eventually someone remembered an old trick to restore their traction. He got a few fluorescent tubes and broke them on the wet track. Then he ground the glass to shards and spread it around. I don’t know exactly how this works, but it does and after a few minutes the cars were driving around again no problem.
That night when we pulled down. Everyone left the site and drove all the equipment to Limassol. It was about 2am when I got to the hotel. We all parked along the verge. When I got up in the morning and looked out I was mortified to see all our vehicles parked along the sea front. It completely blocked the sea view from the hotel. The management didn’t seem to mind though, probably because we had been guests there for two months and drank and ate in the bar nearly every night. Later that day some rides went to the docks to sail for home and Europe. We moved a few others onto some waste ground beside the old football pitch. A couple of workmen had started to rebuild the wall we had knocked down the month before to make the gate. (new concrete breeze block, you could easily spot the difference).
We had a couple of days before we were moving to the next location so we all arranged a bus trip up to mount Olympus (10,000 ft) and had a day skiing. That was probably the best all round day for everyone there and for all ages.
The next venue was to be Paphos.This was good news. Paphos was virgin territory for the funfair and it would fall with the Greek Orthodox Easter holidays.When the fair first came to Cyprus three years earlier it was not possible to get to Paphos as the roads were not passable with the large rides. Since then the new road had been completed. We all went on visits to scope out this place before taking the equipment. Paphos was beautiful. There were hotels and bars everywhere. This was truly the tourist hotspot. The new roads were through mountain tunnels and some of the hills were incredibly steep. The road was not completely finished, but it was passable with care. We all agreed on an evening trip as this would be cooler for the vehicles engines , the tyres and the road would be quieter.