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Last Thoughts

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It was quite a trip to Greece. Doreen had been wanting to do this trip for a long time, but we had always avoided it because we knew there was a lot of travel involved in seeing all the sites she wanted to see. The food was fantastic. The history was incredible, and being able to be in this area where history has been going on for 3,000 years is sort of mind-boggling. It is a lot like Egypt in some regards, that you saw things that you'd read about and heard about pretty much all your life, but now you could actually see they existed. That was a great thing. You can also see where the isthmus was originally, and now they dug a canal to connect across the isthmus, so it's I guess not an isthmus anymore, but it made it a Peloponesian island. But it was just shocking to see this canal. See below.  Highly recommend Greece as a location if you want to travel. There's a lot to see, and if all you want to do is go lay on a beach, you can do that too. The weather was ni...
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Mycenae

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This was our last historic city to stop in. That is Agamemnon's tomb. Or at least they say it's Agamemnon's tomb. There are several tombs like this in the area and they are all really spectacular. There were no photos for scale, it really doesn't do it justice. This is Gaia, the Earth Mother, pulling the umbilical cord out of her belly. There's no way any photograph can do justice to this site. It is way earlier than any of the other things we saw on this trip, about 2000 BC.
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Epidavros

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This is an amazing theater in Epidaurus, Greece. It can seat 14,000 people, maybe more, I don't really remember. But the acoustics are fantastic. When somebody was down there on the stage, even today, if they were talking or clapping, you could hear them all the way in the back.
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Nafplio

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Nafplio was the first capital of modern Greece. In 1821, when they declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire, this is where the headquarters was set. After they won their independence, they needed a king, so they went to all those European countries and said, "We need a king." They gave them Otto from Bavaria. He came here, went to all the Byzantine churches just like a Greek of the time, and stayed king for quite a while until it was apparent he couldn't have any children. Then they needed a new king. So then they got a Danish king. I could look it up, but you could too. The food here, as everywhere we visited in Greece, was fantastic. This was a beet carpaccio dish with prickly pear fruit, balsamic pearls, and little grains. Oh my gosh, it was so delicious. There was a fort above the city. There were 999 steps to get up to the top of it. There used to be a thousand, but when Kapodistrias' horse stepped on the first one, he broke it,...
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Mystras

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Mystras is an old Byzantine city overlooking modern (and ancient) Sparta. That's Sparta below. This is the castle where the Despot (a title, not a description) lived. Many old churches, with some of the frescos intact.
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Monemvasia

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Monemvasia is called the Gibraltar of the East. It's a rock and island that commands the Myrtoan Sea. It was founded in the 5th century and is one of the oldest fortified towns in Europe. It has been variously owned by the Franks, the Venetians, the Byzantines, and the Ottomans. Consequently, the architecture has many different varieties: - Byzantine churches - Churches that have been turned into mosques - Mosques that have been turned into churches - Castles - Old homes There was a little mix-up regarding guides for this island, so we did it on our own. There's also a lighthouse out there. It was really windy trying to get out to it. We didn't make it.  There is the church there called the Hagia Sophia. That means Church of Holy Wisdom, but it was named after the church in Istanbul. Everyone says it's an exact replica. It is not.  We took a very short boat tour out to look at the island from the se...
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Olympia

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We're heading down to Monemvasi, but we wanted to stop in Olympia to see what's what there. Yes, this is where the Olympics started. On the way we stopped by the largest olive grove I've ever seen. Various guides have told us there's either two million or three million trees. These are in the plains below Delphi. You can see them in some of the photographs I took above. Here are some of the olives. The big round one is the one that I picked right off the tree. You can see it's starting to get ripe. The other two, one green, one purple, were on the ground. They're starting to dry out. They don't harvest those on the ground like this anymore; they only take the ones off the tree. They say that the ones that have already fallen have too much acid and don't make good oil or good eating olives. We have to go off the mainland Greece onto the Peloponnese. This is a bridge that connects the Peloponnese to the mainland over the...
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