So, if you've followed the saga on FB at all, you know that I'm frustrated with the timing of this trip. I had found a tour company that I wanted to use (I had heard that driving on Greece is an adventure, and there is a lot of driving to see the things we want to see), who said they had tours from May 1 through October 31, starting every Tuesday. I looked at their itinerary online and saw that we would leave the next Tuesday. I looked at plane tickets, and found good ones for about $300 each. I wrote to the tour company and said we wanted the tour. I didn't hear anything. I went back online later to show Max the plane tickets I had found, and on two out of three sites, they had gone up $200 each! Yikes! So, we bought the ones that were still $300. Then, I heard back from the tour company. The week of the 1st, the tour didn't start until Wednesday, and would leave the next Wednesday. Well, it would have cost us $150 per ticket to change, plus the difference between the old fare and the new one. No way. So, we were on our own.
After much planning, I made an itinerary. Get in Tuesday afternoon, spend the day in Athens, then head out to a tour of the Peloponnese Wednesday through Saturday. Come back to Athens Saturday night, go to Agina (an island close to Athens) Sunday, come back and spend Monday in Athens, go home Tuesday morning. We'd have to miss Meteora (something on the bus tour I wanted to see, but it's not near anything else, so would have taken a whole day just for that), but I was able to add in more things on the Peloponnese than on the tour. I made hotel reservations. Then, I discovered that May 1 (our arrival day) is Labor Day, and everything is closed. Awesome. Plans change. Now, we'll go to Thermopylae on May 1, so we can get back to Athens earlier on Saturday, so we can have Saturday afternoon in Athens. OK, fine. Then, they announce that Sunday is national elections. The Acropolis Museum will only be open Saturday and Sunday morning, closing at 3 both days. Oh, and everything in Greece is closed on Mondays, anyway. There's no way we can get back to Athens Saturday morning, so now we have to see the Acropolis museum Sunday morning, so out goes the island. (I don't want to be on the island Monday, in case something happens, and we get stuck. I'd rather not miss our flight Tuesday) So, there it stands.
Anyway, as we were driving to the airport this morning, we realized we didn't know where long term parking is. We usually fly out of a different airport when we're all going to be gone for a while. So, I looked it up on the phone. Turns out, long term (holiday) parking is a fair distance from the terminal. Luckily, we had allowed plenty of time at the airport. So, we got to holiday parking and had to wait a while for the shuttle. We were a bit nervous that it took so much longer than we had anticipated, but it all worked out fine. There was no line at either check in or bag drop off, and security went really quickly, as well. The flight was uneventful. We were only cruising at 10,000 ft (I swear that's what he said), so I was able to see the ground almost the whole time. It was pretty neat.
We even had a plane fly very near to us, closer than I've ever seen before.
We landed in Athens, and since we were coming from an EU country, we didn't have to go through passport checks or anything. We just got our bags and left. We needed our rental car. I had gotten it through Thrifty (it was a lot cheaper), which didn't have an office right at the airport, but Orbitz said when I booked that if I put in my flight info, Thrifty would send a shuttle for us with the driver waiting with our name. It also said that it was 0.0 miles away from the airport, so I thought it was like many airports where it's just at the far end of the parking lot, or something. But, no. There was nobody with our name. We went outside. There was no shuttle for Thrifty. We saw Hertz and Avis, but no Thrifty. We went to the bus information kiosk. He was busy and grunted with a general pointing of fingers. Nothing. We went to the parking information office, and he let us use his phone to call Thrifty. Oh! Somehow, our flight info hadn't gone through, so they had no idea when we'd be in, and they had scrapped our reservation. But, they could be there in 15 minutes to pick us up. So, we waited.
The guy from Thrifty showed up, and we loaded into his car (yes, his car, not a shuttle). Turns out, he was the only guy working, since it is a Greek holiday. He said we had to go to the office to fill out the paperwork. Lo and behold, it was 15 minutes away. It also took a while to fill out the paperwork. For the credit card, they had to use that thing with the carbon paper! I haven't seen one of those in ages! After the paperwork, he had to take us to a lot back near the airport, where our rental car was actually parked. It ended up taking like an hour for all of it.
But, we were finally off. We set the GPS for Marathon, since it's near Athens, and isn't too far out of the way on the trip to Thermopylae. I knew there was an archaeological museum there, though I thought it probably closed at 3. I had found very little information about Marathon in my books, but the one I had from 2008 said it closed at 3. There were also a tomb and a battle site memorial, though I had no idea where any of them were. Nor did the GPS. We ended up driving right past the rental car office, which I found sadly funny.
I think the GPS needs a name for this trip. It used to be Bruce, but Bruce is too hard to understand with European placenames, so we had to go with generic American female while we're here. I miss Bruce. For this trip, we'll call generic American female Metis, the Titan of good counsel.
It was a nice drive, though. I saw the first of what would be many little roadside memorials.
I also saw lots of wild poppies. They were a beautiful deep red that I just loved. I loved how people just pulled over on the side of the road to pick them.
We also saw the first of many abandoned houses. It was hard to tell on some of them whether they were abandoned mid-construction, or if they were abandoned after that.
We were about to give up on finding anything in Marathon, and I was about to just set the GPS for Thermopylae when we saw a sign for the Tomb of the Athenians. Woo! There was a statue and a huge mound of dirt. We couldn't go in, but I got a picture of the statue.
On Google Maps, it looks like Marathon is just a little jaunt from the freeway between Athens & Thermopylae. But, Metis wanted us to take the scenic route. It kept telling us to go towards the National Road, while taking us on tiny curvy ones. For a while, we were actually afraid the tiny curviness WAS the National Road. Driving an overused Fiat Punto with squishy breaks and loose steering takes some getting used to when you usually drive a well-maintained Toyota Corolla, and I was dreading the next few days in the Peloponnese. It is migraine time, and I have a tendency towards carsickness when I have a migraine. Not good.
But, we eventually got out of that and onto the real National Road. And the tolls. I knew there would be tolls, I had seen it online. But seriously, I'm pretty sure they're trying to fix their deficit through tolls. And gas. Gas averaged about $9 a gallon. (Of course, you buy it in euros per liter, but I converted it for you). It was about 275 miles there and back, and we spent about $20 in tolls and $30 in gas. Nice. Ah, well, it would still be cheaper than the bus tour.
Anyway, Thermopylae. Our poor Metis doesn't know where anything in Greece is. Sometimes, she'll know the name of a city. Most of the time, I have to figure out how she has it spelled. Occasionally, for one reason or another, she'll have the city, but it won't come up in a search. She had Thermopylae, but she didn't know where anything was there. So, we guessed.We drove to where she told us, then followed signs as we saw them.
I knew there was a statue at Thermopylae, I had no idea what else. The first sign we saw was brown (which, we discovered in Marathon, is the sign color for historical sites) and said Thermopylae, so we followed it. It took us to a spring, but led no further. We were looking for a statue. Hmmm. There was a dirt road to the right. We took it. I also had my baby GPS (his name has always been Jeeps) with us, because I had printed out several geocaches for us to find in Greece. Jeeps pointed us down that road, so it seemed a good move. But, he said it was still a ways away. We followed the dirt road for a little while, when it seemed to end. Then, we saw a little more continuing to the right, and Jeeps wanted us to go that way. It looked bad. We decided to go anyway. We didn't make it very far before horrible noises came from the Punto's undercarriage. There was no way to turn around, so Max had to back out of a curvy, potholed, dirt road. But, we made it with no serious damage. We stopped the car and got out at the spring. There was another family there, awkwardly tossing a ball back and forth. It was strange.
The spring smelled. Sulphur, yuck. We touched the water, it was hot. Ah! Thermopylae, duh. Hot is in the name. It means hot gates, actually. We took off our shoes, and stepped in. We didn't know it at the time, but the myth goes that Heracles jumped in the spring to try and wash off hydra poison, and it has been hot ever since.
We gave up on the cache and the statue, and headed back out. Then, we saw a sign for the Leonidas statue! Woo! We followed it.
We found the statue (a rather large memorial, actually) and got out. Jeeps was happy. The funny thing is, it was in the opposite direction of where he had told us to go at the hot spring. The clue for the cache said to look behind the electrical box. So, we did. But, we didn't get very far, because somebody had left a sick poo right behind the box, and I didn't feel like getting close enough to it to find the cache. But, we took pictures of the memorial. Unfortunately, there are huge power lines running behind the statue, which made pictures from the front look horrid. But, we got some nice ones from the back. I think they look nicer anyway, because they have the mountains in the background.
Looking around, we had trouble figuring out how the Persians couldn't get through the mountains except at Thermopylae. There seemed to be lots of places. Turns out, what is now the highway used to be the famous pass. The water in the bay has receded so far that there are now a lot of ways around the mountains that didn't used to be there. Thermopylae was really the only place they could even land.
On the way back to Athens, we thought to stop in Thebes. We wanted to find the monument to the Sacred Band of Thebes, a special unit of the Theban military that was, according to Plutarch, made up of homosexual couples. The story goes that they would fight harder to protect people they loved than they would for others. We had found the Tomb of the Athenians in Marathon and the monument at Thermopylae, so though Metis didn't know the monument in Thebes, we thought we could find it. Then, we'd have dinner in Thebes and get back to Athens for bed. But no. Turns out, Thebes (Thiva on the map, which I figured out, woo for me) is pretty big. And a total dump. We did not find the memorial, nor did we find dinner. We just continued on to Athens.
We didn't know what we'd find near the hotel as far as food went (especially since it was now getting pretty late on a holiday), so we stopped at a big gas station/rest stop and grabbed some dinner. We also grabbed some snacks and a map.
Metis did not know our hotel. Nor did she know the street that we had for the address. She did have a neighborhood named what we had as the street, though. Between the map I bought at the gas station (which was in Greek, mind you), a map on Max's phone (neither of which had the hotel) and Metis, I found a street that was near the hotel, and I just hoped that we could find the right street from there.
We ran in to some pretty nasty traffic around Athens. It was one of those things where we were 30 minutes away from the hotel for like an hour, according to Metis. Then, we missed a turn. Crap. I had purposely picked a hotel on the outskirts of town, close to the main freeway, so we could get out quickly in the morning, so I was very surprised when Metis took us way into town. I thought that the turn we missed must have been very important if we had to go so far out of the way to get back. we found the street that was near our hotel, but after driving in circles, we couldn't find our hotel. There was nowhere to pull over, nowhere to stop. Max found a gas station and asked. They gave us a different address for it altogether. That was wrong, too. Guess what? There are lots of streets with the same names in Athens. We had chosen the wrong one. After much frustration, I finally found the right place. And, it was on Metis, just as Hotel Park, not Park Hotel. It still didn't have the street name, though. But, we finally found it.
The lobby of the Park Hotel/Hotel Park is lovely. The rooms are not. Perhaps it was just our room. It was like going through a crowded theater to get past the beds. The shower looked like it had been installed by a three year old. It was one of those with a hose and no wall attachment, so you have to be a contortionist to actually get yourself clean and rinsed properly. I decided to wait to wash my hair. I saw a little roach. But, I'll let that go, because it may be like Hawaii where you're bound to have roaches, no matter what.
But, it was only for sleeping, and we were so tired that we didn't really care. Plus, it was only 35 euro for the night.
And, it had totally rad art.
I'll leave you with that.
Emma says - There was a lot of confusing and stressful driving. I got a totally awesome honey sesame seed bar at the gas station. It was the greatest thing EVER! The hot springs were neat, they were surprisingly hot. And there were bubbles coming up from the ground. And even though it smelled, it felt really good on my feet.
After much planning, I made an itinerary. Get in Tuesday afternoon, spend the day in Athens, then head out to a tour of the Peloponnese Wednesday through Saturday. Come back to Athens Saturday night, go to Agina (an island close to Athens) Sunday, come back and spend Monday in Athens, go home Tuesday morning. We'd have to miss Meteora (something on the bus tour I wanted to see, but it's not near anything else, so would have taken a whole day just for that), but I was able to add in more things on the Peloponnese than on the tour. I made hotel reservations. Then, I discovered that May 1 (our arrival day) is Labor Day, and everything is closed. Awesome. Plans change. Now, we'll go to Thermopylae on May 1, so we can get back to Athens earlier on Saturday, so we can have Saturday afternoon in Athens. OK, fine. Then, they announce that Sunday is national elections. The Acropolis Museum will only be open Saturday and Sunday morning, closing at 3 both days. Oh, and everything in Greece is closed on Mondays, anyway. There's no way we can get back to Athens Saturday morning, so now we have to see the Acropolis museum Sunday morning, so out goes the island. (I don't want to be on the island Monday, in case something happens, and we get stuck. I'd rather not miss our flight Tuesday) So, there it stands.
Anyway, as we were driving to the airport this morning, we realized we didn't know where long term parking is. We usually fly out of a different airport when we're all going to be gone for a while. So, I looked it up on the phone. Turns out, long term (holiday) parking is a fair distance from the terminal. Luckily, we had allowed plenty of time at the airport. So, we got to holiday parking and had to wait a while for the shuttle. We were a bit nervous that it took so much longer than we had anticipated, but it all worked out fine. There was no line at either check in or bag drop off, and security went really quickly, as well. The flight was uneventful. We were only cruising at 10,000 ft (I swear that's what he said), so I was able to see the ground almost the whole time. It was pretty neat.
We even had a plane fly very near to us, closer than I've ever seen before.
We landed in Athens, and since we were coming from an EU country, we didn't have to go through passport checks or anything. We just got our bags and left. We needed our rental car. I had gotten it through Thrifty (it was a lot cheaper), which didn't have an office right at the airport, but Orbitz said when I booked that if I put in my flight info, Thrifty would send a shuttle for us with the driver waiting with our name. It also said that it was 0.0 miles away from the airport, so I thought it was like many airports where it's just at the far end of the parking lot, or something. But, no. There was nobody with our name. We went outside. There was no shuttle for Thrifty. We saw Hertz and Avis, but no Thrifty. We went to the bus information kiosk. He was busy and grunted with a general pointing of fingers. Nothing. We went to the parking information office, and he let us use his phone to call Thrifty. Oh! Somehow, our flight info hadn't gone through, so they had no idea when we'd be in, and they had scrapped our reservation. But, they could be there in 15 minutes to pick us up. So, we waited.
The guy from Thrifty showed up, and we loaded into his car (yes, his car, not a shuttle). Turns out, he was the only guy working, since it is a Greek holiday. He said we had to go to the office to fill out the paperwork. Lo and behold, it was 15 minutes away. It also took a while to fill out the paperwork. For the credit card, they had to use that thing with the carbon paper! I haven't seen one of those in ages! After the paperwork, he had to take us to a lot back near the airport, where our rental car was actually parked. It ended up taking like an hour for all of it.
But, we were finally off. We set the GPS for Marathon, since it's near Athens, and isn't too far out of the way on the trip to Thermopylae. I knew there was an archaeological museum there, though I thought it probably closed at 3. I had found very little information about Marathon in my books, but the one I had from 2008 said it closed at 3. There were also a tomb and a battle site memorial, though I had no idea where any of them were. Nor did the GPS. We ended up driving right past the rental car office, which I found sadly funny.
I think the GPS needs a name for this trip. It used to be Bruce, but Bruce is too hard to understand with European placenames, so we had to go with generic American female while we're here. I miss Bruce. For this trip, we'll call generic American female Metis, the Titan of good counsel.
It was a nice drive, though. I saw the first of what would be many little roadside memorials.
I also saw lots of wild poppies. They were a beautiful deep red that I just loved. I loved how people just pulled over on the side of the road to pick them.
We were about to give up on finding anything in Marathon, and I was about to just set the GPS for Thermopylae when we saw a sign for the Tomb of the Athenians. Woo! There was a statue and a huge mound of dirt. We couldn't go in, but I got a picture of the statue.
On Google Maps, it looks like Marathon is just a little jaunt from the freeway between Athens & Thermopylae. But, Metis wanted us to take the scenic route. It kept telling us to go towards the National Road, while taking us on tiny curvy ones. For a while, we were actually afraid the tiny curviness WAS the National Road. Driving an overused Fiat Punto with squishy breaks and loose steering takes some getting used to when you usually drive a well-maintained Toyota Corolla, and I was dreading the next few days in the Peloponnese. It is migraine time, and I have a tendency towards carsickness when I have a migraine. Not good.
But, we eventually got out of that and onto the real National Road. And the tolls. I knew there would be tolls, I had seen it online. But seriously, I'm pretty sure they're trying to fix their deficit through tolls. And gas. Gas averaged about $9 a gallon. (Of course, you buy it in euros per liter, but I converted it for you). It was about 275 miles there and back, and we spent about $20 in tolls and $30 in gas. Nice. Ah, well, it would still be cheaper than the bus tour.
Anyway, Thermopylae. Our poor Metis doesn't know where anything in Greece is. Sometimes, she'll know the name of a city. Most of the time, I have to figure out how she has it spelled. Occasionally, for one reason or another, she'll have the city, but it won't come up in a search. She had Thermopylae, but she didn't know where anything was there. So, we guessed.We drove to where she told us, then followed signs as we saw them.
 |
| I like the name Gorgopotamos |
I knew there was a statue at Thermopylae, I had no idea what else. The first sign we saw was brown (which, we discovered in Marathon, is the sign color for historical sites) and said Thermopylae, so we followed it. It took us to a spring, but led no further. We were looking for a statue. Hmmm. There was a dirt road to the right. We took it. I also had my baby GPS (his name has always been Jeeps) with us, because I had printed out several geocaches for us to find in Greece. Jeeps pointed us down that road, so it seemed a good move. But, he said it was still a ways away. We followed the dirt road for a little while, when it seemed to end. Then, we saw a little more continuing to the right, and Jeeps wanted us to go that way. It looked bad. We decided to go anyway. We didn't make it very far before horrible noises came from the Punto's undercarriage. There was no way to turn around, so Max had to back out of a curvy, potholed, dirt road. But, we made it with no serious damage. We stopped the car and got out at the spring. There was another family there, awkwardly tossing a ball back and forth. It was strange.
The spring smelled. Sulphur, yuck. We touched the water, it was hot. Ah! Thermopylae, duh. Hot is in the name. It means hot gates, actually. We took off our shoes, and stepped in. We didn't know it at the time, but the myth goes that Heracles jumped in the spring to try and wash off hydra poison, and it has been hot ever since.
We gave up on the cache and the statue, and headed back out. Then, we saw a sign for the Leonidas statue! Woo! We followed it.
We found the statue (a rather large memorial, actually) and got out. Jeeps was happy. The funny thing is, it was in the opposite direction of where he had told us to go at the hot spring. The clue for the cache said to look behind the electrical box. So, we did. But, we didn't get very far, because somebody had left a sick poo right behind the box, and I didn't feel like getting close enough to it to find the cache. But, we took pictures of the memorial. Unfortunately, there are huge power lines running behind the statue, which made pictures from the front look horrid. But, we got some nice ones from the back. I think they look nicer anyway, because they have the mountains in the background.
Looking around, we had trouble figuring out how the Persians couldn't get through the mountains except at Thermopylae. There seemed to be lots of places. Turns out, what is now the highway used to be the famous pass. The water in the bay has receded so far that there are now a lot of ways around the mountains that didn't used to be there. Thermopylae was really the only place they could even land.
On the way back to Athens, we thought to stop in Thebes. We wanted to find the monument to the Sacred Band of Thebes, a special unit of the Theban military that was, according to Plutarch, made up of homosexual couples. The story goes that they would fight harder to protect people they loved than they would for others. We had found the Tomb of the Athenians in Marathon and the monument at Thermopylae, so though Metis didn't know the monument in Thebes, we thought we could find it. Then, we'd have dinner in Thebes and get back to Athens for bed. But no. Turns out, Thebes (Thiva on the map, which I figured out, woo for me) is pretty big. And a total dump. We did not find the memorial, nor did we find dinner. We just continued on to Athens.
We didn't know what we'd find near the hotel as far as food went (especially since it was now getting pretty late on a holiday), so we stopped at a big gas station/rest stop and grabbed some dinner. We also grabbed some snacks and a map.
Metis did not know our hotel. Nor did she know the street that we had for the address. She did have a neighborhood named what we had as the street, though. Between the map I bought at the gas station (which was in Greek, mind you), a map on Max's phone (neither of which had the hotel) and Metis, I found a street that was near the hotel, and I just hoped that we could find the right street from there.
We ran in to some pretty nasty traffic around Athens. It was one of those things where we were 30 minutes away from the hotel for like an hour, according to Metis. Then, we missed a turn. Crap. I had purposely picked a hotel on the outskirts of town, close to the main freeway, so we could get out quickly in the morning, so I was very surprised when Metis took us way into town. I thought that the turn we missed must have been very important if we had to go so far out of the way to get back. we found the street that was near our hotel, but after driving in circles, we couldn't find our hotel. There was nowhere to pull over, nowhere to stop. Max found a gas station and asked. They gave us a different address for it altogether. That was wrong, too. Guess what? There are lots of streets with the same names in Athens. We had chosen the wrong one. After much frustration, I finally found the right place. And, it was on Metis, just as Hotel Park, not Park Hotel. It still didn't have the street name, though. But, we finally found it.
The lobby of the Park Hotel/Hotel Park is lovely. The rooms are not. Perhaps it was just our room. It was like going through a crowded theater to get past the beds. The shower looked like it had been installed by a three year old. It was one of those with a hose and no wall attachment, so you have to be a contortionist to actually get yourself clean and rinsed properly. I decided to wait to wash my hair. I saw a little roach. But, I'll let that go, because it may be like Hawaii where you're bound to have roaches, no matter what.
But, it was only for sleeping, and we were so tired that we didn't really care. Plus, it was only 35 euro for the night.
And, it had totally rad art.
I'll leave you with that.
Emma says - There was a lot of confusing and stressful driving. I got a totally awesome honey sesame seed bar at the gas station. It was the greatest thing EVER! The hot springs were neat, they were surprisingly hot. And there were bubbles coming up from the ground. And even though it smelled, it felt really good on my feet.
Well, now I see that Dan can't come with us to Greece. He gets very stressed and unpleasant when "plans" don't work out. I like stuff like that...more adventure.
ReplyDelete