I still think we should have gone straight to Penopolesia. Then we would have gotten to Santorini.
I still think we should have gone straight to Penopolesia. Then we would have gotten to Santorini.
That's easy for the passenger to say.
I concur. The first time I saw Temple of Poseidon, my first ancient Greek ruin, it was soooo neat. You learn about it, read about, look at pictures, dream about seeing it and then you see it. Wow! A Dream come true.
What I learn at the Zeus temple was that columns were not one long column like I thought, but the column is made up of many flat, round stone that are layed on each other to form the column. I never knew that. It was neat. Now that I think about it, I can see how it was built. It was not as impressive as one long column, but still it looked like one column.
I was really sad we couldn’t go to Santorini.
That Brit was pretty cute.
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Sounion -- ΣουνιοThe breakfast at our hotel was complimentary, so we dug in. They have cocktail weiners for breakfast over there, and they are damn good. I probably had 12 of them. The orange juice is a bit watery, and there is always some sort of brick-like cake. I had three of those. And then we piled into Big Red and headed South!
When Zorba broke it down for us, he said that the area we were staying in was sort of a resort area, and that Cape Sunion would be cool to check out. The ancient Temple of Poseidon was there. We could do a day trip to the island of Aegina. Plus, I was looking for a way to ease into the vacation, and I figured that three nights here would allow us to get used to the area, get to know the customs, and maybe allow me to have a few days of the ever-elusive "actual vacation" vacation, instead of our standard "adventure" vacations.
So here we are driving along the coast south of Athens, and it was a pretty nice drive. It was 8:30am on Sunday morning, so it was very relaxing. All the road signs were just like France/Italy, and mostly in English (thanks to the Olympics), so I was instantly comfortable.
We parked the car, and bought our tickets, and since it was so early we got to explore almost all of it by ourselves. We checked it out for a couple of hours, and then it started getting hot. Questions regarding sun screen were answered in turn by more questions regarding where you had put the sunscreen. So we figured we could argue a bunch more (and this being only 6 months into the marriage, the fighting was still a bit novel and interesting) or we could do the boring thing and buy some sunscreen. Duly armed and lubed, we got back in the Red and drove back to Glyfada. We still had half a day left. What could we do, being only 10 minutes south of Athens.... a whole afternoon to kill... what the heck were we going to do... oh alright, we grabbed the bus into Athens (remember, we really didn't want to drive through there). When we got on, Lin-Wei tried to give the bus driver some money, but he just waved her off. So we slunk off to the back of the bus, knowing that we had screwed up the procedure somehow, but not really caring all that much (unless we got kicked off. Then we might care slightly more). The resort area turned into a more commerce oriented area, then to a city area, and then to a really busy and crazy city area. I kept trying to find where we were on the map and had no luck. But then we passed a really big building with a crowd and soldiers, so we got off at the next stop. Looking at the map I thought that we were by the Parliament building, but Lin-Wei thought it was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Turns out...we were both right. Yay! cough So now that we had our bearings, it was time to eat. The guide-book came up way short here. The places that sounded interesting weren't in business anymore, and the rest was just crappy sandwiches. I suggested we find the Tourist office, and the nice lady there gave us some ferry schedules to/from Crete, and to/from Santorini (Thera). As you no doubt remember, we had 3 days in the middle of the next week were nothing was planned, and we had to find a way to get to Santorini (Thera) and Crete, and back again. And it wasn't looking good.
This temple was kinda cool because you could see a couple of the pillars that had fallen down, and it was neat to see how they were constructed. Next up was a hike to Mt. Lycavittos, the highest point in Athens. I read something about a cable car ride up to the top in the guidebook, and I'm all about that sort of thing. We weren't sure it would be running on a Sunday, and even if it was, it was probably too late to catch it, but we had nothing else to do (did I mention that we were saving the Acropolis for the last couple days of our trip) so we hiked. Up steep hills. When the hills got too steep, we hiked up steep stairs. and when the ground got even steeper, we stared up at the rock of Mt. Lycavittos, and wondered where the heck the cable car was. A street map of the area showed something called a "funicular", which was a straight line from the street to the middle of the mountain. We may not be the smartest knives in the drawer, but you can't spell "funicular" without "fun" so to the funicular we went. And when we found it, we saw a tunnel going up through the mountain all the way to the top. And it was open! Until 11pm, in fact! And Al did look upon the Funicular and said that it...was...good!
Back to the downtown area we went, passing through the international embassy area. The UK embassy was actually guarded by 4 guys with machine guns, with barricades and the whole works. One of the UK guards winked at Lin-Wei. I scowled, and we hurried through there. Machines guns + vacation + winking Brits = bad.
Darting across the roaring traffic (it was getting worse now. I'm glad we didn't have to drive...through...Athens, cause that would, like, really suck, right? But I wouldn't be one to use a cliche like foreshadowing in a travel log, would I?) So we were darting across the really, really, really bad traffic, and we thought maybe we'd check out some of the travel agencies we saw earlier to try and hook up those Santorini (Thera) tickets. But they were all closed. But imagine our luck! A gentlemen spotted us and told us that he worked in the "best travel agency in town! Open 24 hours. Internet! And we are open 24 hours!" He hustled us into a second floor office, where granola guys and granola girls were surfing the net next to big backpacks. We told him our game plan, and he punched up some stuff on the computer, and frowned. There were no ferries to Santorini on the dates that we wanted. Could we shift the dates? No, we had already booked hotels on either side of the trip, so we were stuck with those days. With a sigh, lamenting a lost sale to obviously willing tourists, he bid us farewell, but not before pointing Lin-Wei to the bathroom. Back to the bus and back to our hotel. From there we walked back to the Glyfada town square for dinner and a steak joint recommended to us by our hotel. The guys out front immediately tried to wrangle us into the place when we got close, but we were headed there anyway, so whatever. We had bad steak and chicken, and fries, and walked home. I fought my mental battle with the trash can, and went to bed.
Wait! Before we turn out for the night, it should be mentioned that we decided what we were going to do about Santorini. And it was this: No Santorini for us! We threw in the towel, and decided to stay in Crete for an extra couple of days. So the next day we had to hook that up.
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Lin-Wei had wanted to get in the car and drive over to Peloponnesia right away, but I was having none of that! I was volunteered once again as the driver, and as the driver I got 2 votes instead of one, so the 3-day stay in the Athens resort area passed 2-1.
