Location: Athens

David awoke with a bit of a sore throat and a cough, but he proved himself a real driving hero this day.

We had another breakfast on the hotel deck, then packed and went to pay the bill. Not only had the host reduced the overall room charge by 20 euro, but there was no charge on our bill for the dinner the night before (which the cook had said would be 40 euro before the wine). We questioned this missing charge and were told dinner had been on the house, like the 4 or 5 big bottles of water, the plate of bread and olives they brought with the ice we asked for, the kids’ afternoon juices, and the beer they brought David because the pool was closed when he wanted to go in it. It all helped make up for the earlier fuss, but we couldn’t help wonder: Is this generosity why Greece is broke?

We didn’t have to drive very far before we reached Nemea, home of the famous lion wrestled by Heracles and site of the Neman Games. Because of the latter, there are some neat ruins just outside the tiny, tiny town, and, given their remote location, we were alone as we walked in the nicely partially/reconstructed Temple to Zeus, the huge excavated bathhouse, the footprint of an ancient hotel, and the small, tidy museum. There must have been 8 or 10 people working at the empty site, and it would be a lovely job. It is well-landscaped with shade trees, flowers, and picnic tables to chat all day.

We have been drinking mostly white wine while we have been here, mostly because experience has taught us that, ironically, the home of Dionysus doesn’t produce very good red wine. But there are exceptions, and we have found that the exception almost always involves red from Nemea. So we decided that, before we left town, we would pop by one of the four wineries listed on the road signs and buy a bottle of two. So, we followed the “wine road” sign. Big mistake. It lead nowhere. We followed other signs to specific wineries. We found buildings with stainless steel vats, but none had a parking spot or anything like storefront. We tried three different places. Then we decided to just stop at the “snak bar shop souvenirs” with the sign that also said “neman wines.” What we found was a sad little taverna where neither Mom nor Pop would give us anything more intelligible than a head shake and a finger point to back where we’d failed.

We gave up and headed for the highway, but just before we hit the main highway, we saw a roadside stand that sold nothing but wine … Only it was odd. There were almost no glass bottles, just four different colors of wine in water bottles. Inside were four vats with spigots and signs with prices in euros per litre. The man (no English) let us sample two, and we bought one (paying extra to get a litre in a bottle with a cork).

We stopped in Ancient Corinth for lunch overlooking Temple to Apollo. We thought about visiting the Temple to Aphrodite since this was her Sin City for soldiers, complete with 1000 sacred prostitutes (at least until Paul tried to shut that stuff down), but it was up a big hill, and we had at least another hour to go before hitting Athenian gridlock.

We got into Athens but we turned too soon (never trust a sign with an arrow here), got quite turned around, turned too soon again (we should not have trusted that other sign!) and ended up jumping marble curbs across pedestrian streets until we got ourselves wedged in an alley with no way out other than a 180 degree turn. It required nerves of steel, an external navigator, and a 20 point turn in the execution. Then only one more wrong turn (damn you, signs!), and we found our home.

And it did feel like home. We were back on familiar territory, in the same nifty house as before. Our host, Dionysia was not there to greet us this time, but she left a surrogate with no English who dialed Dionysia’s work number for us. (Our host is a lawyer who works for the government. She implied that she “could not possibly leave work today,” and we were not surprised.)

We all agree: old town Athens feels great! We like the air, the energy, the charm. We like having options in every direction, and getting everywhere on foot.

And speaking of options, only Athens can offer us an entirely vegetarian restaurant, so that is where we headed (thanks again for the suggestion, Debbie). Triumph felt a little guilty when I suggested not eating traditional Greek, but we have exhausted every combination of shared appetizers, and all the tomatoes and feta and fried food was getting monotonous. “Avocado” is like a little piece of the west coast in downtown Athens, with a juice bar, a yoga schedule on the chalkboard, and a health food store next door.

But a lot is different when you eat Barbarian. This was the first time, for instance, that we had to wait for a table. While we waited, we wandered (a bit trepidatiously) to Syntagma Square and found no evidence of the previous night’s craziness. Then, when we were seated, we were

1- not given bread

2- not charged for water

3- served by a woman

4- given the bill before the food arrived

5 - rushed a bit to leave

6 - inside to eat

None of this is very Greek. But it was so, so so refreshing to order unusual items off a completely accessible menu.

Ironically, Athena started to not feel well right after the meal she adored eating; it sounded a lot like how I had felt the day before. This made getting lost in the Plaka for 20 minutes rather uncomfortable for her. Thank heavens for helpful English speaking ex-pats.

Day 17 -

I did not sleep well at all at Petite Planete, and I woke up not feeling great. I wasn’t very hungry, despite the great breakfast they provided, and I felt much worse afterward. Because of that, we decided not to venture too far away (like Epiduraus). I took a half hour to rest and then we headed into Argos.

Although Argos is not very big, it seems the days here are not complete without getting a little bit lost. We had already been warned that the hilltop fortress was under renovations and that the renovations were halted because of the austerity measures. We also found a closed Sanctuary to Athena, so we settled on going to the Argos agora and theatre. The agora isn’t much to see, but, if it wasn’t 36 degrees, we could have stayed longer at the theatre. It is steeper but more complete than the Theatre of Dionysus, and in quite a lovely setting.

After grabbing a coffee and some directions, we headed a bit out of town to find the Hellinikon pyramid, which our host said was one of the spots where they lit big signal fires like the one Clytemnestra would have used in her torch relay to learn of the fall of Troy (and start running the bath). It was very cool, and the view of the Argolic Gulf and the surrounding area was amazing.

Sadly, I still didn’t feel great, so we went back to the hotel. I slept and the others relaxed. In a little more than an hour, I felt much better and it was about cool enough to tackle the site we were there to see: the home of Agamemnon et al.

There were very few people there. Mycenae’s Lions Gate, the Cyclopean stones, the cistern, and the beehive tombs were just as impressive as ever, but we were not allowed to walk in the palace as we were in 1997; that was a little disappointing. Most of the site is just foundation stones, but the situation is impressive, and it is fun to try and imagine what it was like in 1600-1200 BC. We went to the museum too, which was small but nicely organized (all their good stuff is Athens).

David and I had a quick swim with a retired British couple and young French family (our kids just read by the pool), and then we had our yummy, specially-made, three course vegetarian dinner at hotel.

We watched news of the Greek parliamentary vote and footage of the riots in Athens, and went to bed wondering what the big city would bring us the next day.

Location: Mycenae

We fueled up at the enormous breakfast buffet, did a little souvenir shopping in Olympia, and headed out. I had spoken to the hotel manager about our drive to Mycenae, where things are a thousand years older than they are in Athens. Google maps showed three ways to get there, so I asked the him, “Which one of these is the treacherous mountain road, which one is the terribly curvy road that is in rough shape, and which one is the fairly easy and well-maintained one?” He didn’t even blink. He nodded and said that the one that appears the most direct is the most curvy and mountainous one, and the one that seems to veer the farthest off course is the easy one to drive. Of course.

We got turned about only once (okay, twice), at a three-pronged fork in the road near Kristena, and we had to backtrack about 6 km, but soon we found the big road with all those tunnels and tolls. When did they build all this? For the 2004 Olympics? It was, as the hotel man warned, a little dull by Greek standards (no cute villages, just a lot of bamboo fields), but after those gravel goat paths that they call roads in Kefalonia, some smooth, boring concrete was just fine.

We kept passing these large, empty modern buildings in the middle of nowhere. Triumph noticed that they all had basketball courts, and most had some large construction equipment parked around them. I suspect they were built during — and for — the construction of this road. Near one of these buildings, we stopped at a “Super Market” that looked like it would just be a big grocery store. Inside, however, were half a dozen smaller stores (lunch stands, coffee shops, a souvenir shop, a candy store, a book store, some kiddie rides…) all with separate tills but all staffed by three people who moved around. The common WC had showers. We bought a hot cheese pie (for the starving kid), some local wine (for later), a couple organic sesame seed bars (everything here is made out of sesames), and a cappuccino (for the driver). But we could have also bought helium balloons, some frozen octopus, or a large statue of Apollo. Seriously. Who shops here? We ate our snack out on the large patio overlooking the bleak highway and shared some bites with three kittens. Where did they come from? So weird.

It got cloudy for our last push into Argos too, which was also very odd. It almost rained one night, for five minutes, when we were in Kefalonia, but generally wind is all we see for weather. But by the time we pulled up to the hotel, it was bright and hot again. It had been a long day.

Back in March, we booked our two night stay at La Petite Planete based on nostalgia. David and I stayed here in 1997, and had a magnificent time. We had sat on the deck overlooking the Argolitic plain just under the Mycenaean Acropolis, and we had a spent a lovely night having dinner, wine, and a chat with the hotel manager. If we weren’t the only guests then, we were one of two groups. In my emails with the hotel, I was told that the daughters of the owner were now running things, and they were excited to welcome us back.

The woman who greeted us warmly at the door then tried to check us in, and everything went sideways. She asked if it was true that we had requested rooms at the back. We had not. She had confused us with another couple who had been here in 1977 and were returning as we were. The rooms she had set aside for us were awful! Small, smelly, last updated in the 70s, hemmed in by the mountain (so no view at all), and screaming with these loud cricket-like bugs we have encountered everywhere here.

She apologized for the misunderstanding, offered to let us stay the first night for free, but claimed she had nothing else. I was devastated. We took a few minutes to figure out what to do next. Mycenae is the tiniest of towns. There are only about three places to stay, and we were not up to a hunt.

The host returned to say she dug up our email and we did not specifically request a front view, so she would reduce our rate by 10 euro per night (rather than a free night), and let us use her pool if we decided to go stay elsewhere. We sat by the pool and tried to reconcile ourselves to the inevitable let-down of memory and expectation.

Then, somehow, miraculously, two rooms appeared on the lower floor on the front of the building. They were not beautiful, but they were bigger, and, because they weren’t nosed up against the mountain, they were airier, and quieter. The view now has two big houses in it, but at least it was closer. We remain unconvinced that the hotel (with about 20 rooms) ever had more than 5 rooms full. Too weird!

The room thing settled, we went for a swim and chatted with a lovely Irish couple with two young kids who were all in Greece for a wedding.

Then the next hurdle: dinner. Our hotel only offers a set menu, and we had not mentioned in advance that we were 3/4 vegetarian. We could not eat there that night. The host sent us down to La Belle Helene, a fairly famous place in this town, which we found out is run by her cousin. This is where the first (and many subsequent) archeologist, Schliemann, stayed, as well as many, many famous writers, artists, politicians, and a fair number of nazis too. They have a display of their guest book with names like Virginia Woolf, Jean Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, Bertrand Russell, and Jack Kerouac in it. We were the only customers there. The owner (great-great grandson of the original owner) told us exactly how he feels about the economic crisis and the EU interlaced with tales of German invasion, Elgin theft, and Greek mythology. Mycenae is still pretty close to its roots, and clearly a bit of a family affair.

After dinner, we walked around the town, behind the main strip, and met every (friendly) stray dog in town, and there quite a number of them. We went to bed hoping tomorrow’s dig into the past would be smoother.

After eating as much as we could off the hotels’s 30+ feet of buffet breakfast tables full of baked goods, homemade jams, and lots of things involving olives, cheese, eggs, and raisins, we tried to figure out how best to tackle Olympia. The guidebook said the site is busiest between 10 and 1, and, sure enough, when we got there at 11, there were no less than a dozen tour buses in the parking lot. So we did what our guidebook said to do first anyway: visit the small Museum of the Olympic Games in Antiquity. They had neat write-ups and displays about all the original sporting contests (discus throwing, long jumping with weights, armoured races, bull hurdling, somersaulting over swords …) was well as about the rituals (we saw scrapers to remove the olive oil and chalk from an athlete’s body) and rules (did you know that they throw women off mountains if they snuck in to the games?) There was one other person in the museum. We stayed about an hour. When we emerged, it was hotter, but all the buses were magically gone!

Thankfully, the sitehas a number of trees (for shade breaks), and it is so big that it absorbs quite a few people. It didn’t feel nearly as crowded as Delphi, and you could see big groups coming from a distance and head in a different direction. One nifty thing about this site is that you can truly experience it up close; with the exception of Zeus’ Temple, you can walk through everything rather than just around it. It allows a real feeling being there back then.

Triumph predictably beat David in their sprint at the stadium, so we took the required picture of Triumph under the triumphal arch (the krypti). We also determined that I (neither an athlete nor a male) would be the only one who could truly fit in the bathtubs in the Palaestra (where athletes trained and men gathered to chat). We walked in Hera’s temple, saw the hill where Zeus was born, and marvelled at the size of the toppled columns of Zeus’ Temple.

After a brief ice cream/beer break, it was off to the museum. The big draws here are the pediment statues from the Temple to Zeus, including the almost complete central statue of Apollo; the statue of Zeus and young Ganymede (and his chicken); and the statue of Hermes and baby Dionysus. However, we also like all the wee figurines, many of horses, that people left as offerings to Zeus (do you think he gives them to all his illegitimate children?). And there were SO MANY helmets! It was a very full afternoon.

Another swim and dinner at the hotel, then to bed in preparation for our longest road trip yet.

Location: Olympia - Hotel Europa

Location: Olympia

It was with mixed feelings that we packed up our gear and boarded our 12:15 ferry back to the Peloponnese. Those five nights on Kefalonia were the longest stretch in one place, and it was starting to feel like home.

The ferries here are so casual it is almost unnerving. There’s no big corralling of cars or people, the men on the dock wear flip flops but no shirts, there are no lanes, no attendants on the docks, and the cars on the boat are packed like a game of Tetris, so only the driver can be present at its parking.

We grabbed inside seats by a full length window, boldly opened the curtains and ate our picnic lunch during our 90 minute ride.

The first half hour east of Killini were as we expected from before: fields and pumpkin stands.

We stopped for gas at a fairly major station, but they would not take a credit card, only cash. We passed by a couple smaller stations knowing it would be the same. We finally found one that would take our card, a combination gas station, car dealership, and personal home.

We have been paying cash for everything other than our pre-paid rooms, but as the summit talks and bank lines continue, we are getting more cautious with the cash. (There have been a number of times when people cannot break a bill larger than 20 … and once, even a ten)

As we moved inland, the landscape took a decidedly un-touristy and sad turn. We started seeing a lot more dilapidation, Roma beggars, so many buildings for sale, and mountains and mountains of trash bags piled up all along the highway. This is the face of suffering Greece. The Greece of massive unemployment, pension cuts, reduced government spending, trade and tourism slumps. We felt like we were at the back door. We suspect the road from Athens to Olympia is kept better (the front door, the one for the tour buses), but few must arrive from the West, from the alley.

And then oddly, but sadly not surprisingly, everything got green and pretty and clean as we entered the small one-trick town of Olympia. There are no Air BNBs here, so we are at the Europa Hotel, just up the hill from the site. It is the most tourist-centric place we have seen. When we pulled into the parking lots, a tour bus was pulling away. Inside was a small army of smiling servile staff and in the courtyard was a pool, with bar service, full of French and English speakers. It is lovely and clean and verdant, but it seems a little false. The Best Western recently bought it.

We went for a swim and a read by the pool and then dressed for dinner. Our guide book actually recommended this hotel as one of the best restaurants in town, and it is very charmingly situated. The tables and chairs sit on grass (grass is rare here) overlooking a lush valley, and the sun sets charmingly behind a distant hill. The fruit trees around the tables drip with candles, there are cloth napkins and multiple forks at every place setting, and the paths are lined with carefully placed roses bushes. The wait staff is charming, if a bit overly deferential. While it may be that Greece functions largely on tourist dollars, this feels a bit like those resorts in Mexico: a beautiful spot built solely to pamper non-natives. Oh well, this too is a very real side of Greece, and we are seeing them all. Tomorrow, like all good pilgrims to the Peloponnese, we are off to the Olympics.