Today we visited Delphi. The Greek gods had sent out messengers to find the center of knowledge and discovered the oracle at Delphi – here, at “the navel of the world.” If the oracle lived there today, his brain would be cooked. By the time we visited the site at 9:30 am, it was already about 90 degrees F. We didn't was to spend a lot of time at the site, but wanted to see the Tholos, the famous remains that everyone has seen in pictures and postcards of Delphi.
Shortly after leaving Delphi, we passed through a cute little town perched on a mountainside. It caters to the ski trade in the winter, but it was even busy at this time. The slopes look almost vertical to me. It's hard to imagine skiing in this heat.
Our next stop was to be Mycenea, the pre-classical city of Agamemnon. By now Yoyi and Rosi were tired of driving and tired of ruins and rebellling against my rigid scheduling. They decided to sit on a bench under a tree while I visited the site. This is the city that appears in all art history books, the “Lion's Gate” being the most famous icon. The civilization dates from around 1300 BCE, and considerable archaeological excavation and reconstruction is underway.
Imagine huge stone buildings, all having fallen down over centuries, and having been strewn about by the forces of nature and by people walking off with building materials to construct new buildings, which themselves have since fallen down. Then thousands of years later you come upon the scene and try to reassemble the puzzle – with missing pieces, of course – back into buildings. Remember: unlike a puzzle you buy in the store, there's no picture on the cover to tell you what the finished product is supposed to look like.
I ran through the ruins in 40-degree weather, as the girls allowed me a half hour. I took about 40 minutes. After we left the main site, we stopped on the way down the hill at the vaulted tomb of Agamemnon, another structure you may have seen in your art history classes.
On the way to our overnight destination, we passed citrus groves, almond groves, and apricot groves. We passed through more little towns with their narrow winding streets. In one of them, a local man seemed to be stationed at one of the narrow points helping to direct traffic through and avoid head-on collisions.
We arrived at Nafplio, at the south end of the Peloponese, fronting on the Mediterranean, where the Aegean meets the Adriatic. Looking for our hotel, we came upon a storekeeper who spoke no English or German, but did speak some French. So he directed us in French, but we must have missed one part of the instructions. We came back to the town square and located the tourist bureau, and the greeter gave us a map and directions. It has surely saved us a few times to be able to communicate in German and now French.
We drove up the hill behind the medieval castle and parked. We went down some steps and through an old Venetian city gate down some more steps and saw a sign for the bed and breakfast. The office was up a flight of stairs, where we arrived, winded. The proprietor showed us to our rooms. The establishment comprised a number of older refurbished buildings that followed the hillside down towards the town. Our rooms were a total of about 3 flights down, on a courtyard with lemon trees. Our balcony overlooked a house with an orange tree, and the street that led towards the town square.
Problem was that, whether we wanted to go to the car or to breakfast or to the town, there were hills or steps to climb. One of us complained about this in front of the proprietor, who offered, “People who want flat go to Holland. People come to Greece to see the beautiful mountains.”
Roast Lamb had sounded good earlier in the trip, so we asked for a recommendation from our hotelier. He pointed to the restaurant from his terrace. (Remember, we were high above the city at this point.) We walked down to the restaurant and ordered two dishes that were so large that we decided to share them, and we still couldn't finish the food. One was roasted lamb with potato; the other was lamb in a typical egg/lemon sauce with leeks and dill. I don't have to rub it in that it was delicious, do I?
After dinner and a walk through the tourist section, we settled in to have ice cream on the town square. We were reminded again how pleasant it is to spend time in the little towns of our travels. What a difference we enjoyed here, as compared to the crush of the big cities we have visited.
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