October 22 - Friday - Monemvasia, Greece

We sailed into Monemvasia, Greece, in what looked like good weather for touring. I always try to rise early so I can see us come into port. The moon was bright, shining down on the bay.

Sailing into Monemvasia

I watched them unload the tenders. This isn't a port where we can dock.


Tenders getting ready to transport us to island

Each tender holds about 60 people.

We dressed for the day, wearing layers that we could remove as the temperatures rose, had breakfast, went to the check in place for tours, realized we were there 45 minutes early, picked up our tour permits (stickers we wear on our clothing), and went back to our rooms.

The Cruise Activity Director came on the loud speaker and told us the weather was already hotter than forecast, so we both quickly changed into shorts. I exchanged my heavier short-sleeve t-shirt for a tank top that I could cover with a scarf to shelter my shoulders.

I went out to the verandah and realized the air smelled different. Looking up, I realized we were under a really dark cloud.

We grabbed our rain gear and repacked some of our stuff (we had decided to tour light today, when we thought the weather was good), and rushed out the door, down two decks, and sat waiting for our number to be called (4). We were still a little early.

Lauren decided he needed his raincoat, so he ran back up stairs to get it.
In the meantime, some lady told me that 4 had been called about 5 minutes before, so I stood (dancing on my feet hoping he'd hurry, although no one could tell how fidgety I was because I really can't dance on my feet), and when I saw him coming down the stairs, I headed him off and we went down 3 more decks to the exit.

By the time we were getting in our tender, it was pouring!! Simply pouring. We rocked and rolled across the bay, and by the time we got there, it seemed to have let up some.
Our bus was waiting for us to drive us up the hill to the old city. You can see the road and the old city in this picture.


Road to Old City, lined with cars (no cars or parking in Old City)

The tour was short, and somewhat informative, but expensive. It was worth about half of what we paid for it. I would have cancelled it, but by the time I realized I had probably made a mistake booking it, it was yesterday morning. I needed to cancel by the night before. Oh well!

At the end of the road, in the picture, is the lower town. We walked through it fairly easily - cautiously, though, because the stone walking paths were difficult and slick. What you don't see as obviously is that there is an upper section of town, too - high on those cliffs. It's possible to walk there, but more difficult and risky on a day like this when the paths were slick. The upper town hasn't been reconstructed as has the older town, but it's apparently beautiful up there from all reports and some pictures I've seen on the internet. Lauren attempted it and got only a little way. Had the weather been good, I would have tried it, as well, but I'm already a risk to have out on a day like this with weather like this. I realize there are some parts of this beautiful world I'll never see - but I know they're there and I can look at the pictures of others.

The town is interesting and difficult to navigate because of the rocky footpaths. 


Looking down from the central plaza in the Old City

There are no vehicles allowed in this town, so any goods that are brought in must be carried.

Carrying goods into the town

The town is currently a resort town. No permanent residents live in it. Apparently, Momenvasia is a popular German vacation town, according to our guide. They buy second homes here (easy to do because both countries are part of the EU) and come and go for holidays.

The water was rough when we tendered back to the ship. It was rock and roll all the way, and kind of fun.

Rockin' and rollin' (Disney E Ticket ride)

Tenders are just the larger lifeboats. The tender crews had a lot of trouble getting the boats back in position so they could be loaded back on the ship. In fact, the ship had a lot of trouble staying in one place. Lauren watched the process from deck 7 where the boats are stored, and he said the last two were loaded when the ship was moving. Apparently, the captain had more control over the ship's movements when it was moving than he did when it was anchored.

All's well, though. It was a fun, but short stop. Now we are on our way to Rome via some scenic cruising routes. We will arrive Sunday morning, go through whatever process we need to go through there, and a HAL vendor will get us to our hotel. We'll be there for four nights, then we'll be transported to the airport and catch our flight home - Rome to Chicago, Chicago to San Diego.

Our flickr Monemvasia pictures: Monemvasia

October 21 - Thursday - Mykonos, Greece

We didn't take a tour in Mykonos. The tours all looked really mild and didn't describe anything we couldn't do on our own. Mykonos is probably larger than the bit we saw, but we must have been in the most scenic part of it.


Mykonos, Greece

There's nothing that doesn't treat your eyes in this part of town - the older section. It's white and white and white, with bold blues, reds, greens, yellows for doors and windows, and everything has a cast of blue from the beautiful sky (the day we were there) and the ocean.


One of many beautiful, quaint buildings

Blue sky plus blue sea plus stark white stucco equals blue everywhere

There are oodles of shops with colorful wares. I really liked the colors in the outfits hanging by this door.

Everything is lovely

We walked higher into the town so we could have a look from above, and we were rewarded with this scene.

View from higher in town

We enjoyed watching the locals, many of whom were fishermen, go to and fro, some selling their wares by the sea. One striking difference I noticed between the shopkeepers in Mykonos and those in Turkey were that none of the Mykonos shopkeepers tried to sell you anything. I think they could learn from Turkey. Part of the fun of Turkey was the charm of those who tried to sell you anything and everything. As you strolled by shop after shop, men and women shopkeekpers alike might whisper "I want your money," "I have a deal you can't pass up," or something like that. It was all in good fun, although at the end of the day, every sale that resulted from the fun was good business for the Turkish shopkeepers.

Most of the vehicles we saw were very small or were little Vespa-type skooters, and they skooted in and out of those small narrow places where we walked. The amount of traffic in what we would have considered the walking area was amazing. We watched one guy bring his truck into the beginning of the old town, open the back and unload his skooter, and take off toward town. We didn't get a picture, unfortunately. It was funny.

We found a cafe overlooking the water (that had a bathroom), and we bought coffee, a Coke, and a sweet (as our rent) and sat enjoying the sights for a couple of hours after our walk. A very sweet day.

We had the most beautiful sunset as we were sailing from Mykonos to Monemvassia. We've had such rainy weather, this was really a treat.

A sunset to remember

Our flickr Mykonos pictures: Mykonos

October 9 - Saturday - Athens

We were up and off to breakfast this morning (quite a nice American Buffet) and then out to hop the Marriott shuttle to the Hop-on Hop-off City Tour bus by 9:00. Problem was that everyone else wanted to catch the Marriott shuttle, too, and so it filled up and left 15 minutes earlier than scheduled. We weren't going to wait for another hour to hopefully catch it for its next trip, so we had the front-door person call us a cab (from just around the corner, hiding out of sight behind some bushes) to take us to town. The cost was 8 Euros, an amount we found was more than twice what we should have paid when we caught a cab back home in the evening for 3.80 Euros. Hmmmm ... nice little thing these guys at the front door have going. Oh well, you have to earn a living somehow!

All's well that ends well or works well, though, and the day seemed to work well for us. We first rode the Hop-on Hop-off a complete round trip, about 60 to 70 minutes, then we rode a little past our starting point and got off at the Acropolis.

The walk to the entrance area was quite steep, but definitely doable. I wasn't sure I could go the further steps into the main area, but Lauren checked it out and came back to retrieve me. Arm in arm, we made it, and it was definitely worth the effort. (See the flickr photos to see the rest of the view.)

The rumor is, as they tell it here, the gods met in these elaborate buildings (or at least where these buildings are located) and discussed whether or not the creation of human kind was a good thing. Apparently the vote was close, but in favor of the creation, and the deed was done. Here's a Wikipedia article about the Parthenon - interesting.

Looking at Athens from this great height shows us a sea of white houses and buildings in all directions.

The Greeks also claim to be the first to see the divine within human kind, and with that insight came the idea of individual freedoms. With the idea of individual freedoms came the idea (and ideal) of democracy. Western thought has been built ever since on that idea -- either democracy in action or the strife for democracy. The early Greeks changed the world! Even the Romans, who conquored the world after Greece, retained their awe of the Greek way of thinking. Another rumor we heard was that the Roman Emperor Hadrian (around 132 CE) came to Athens to be educated because he felt Roman education was inferior. For more about Hadrian and Hadrian's Arch in Athens, see the Wikipedia article.

We hopped on and off the bus several times throughout the day, enjoying the National Gardens (where we took no pictures) while we admired the beautiful way in which they maintain them. A lot of work must go into these gardens.

Yesterday, we passed a building with a couple guard buildings out front, and we guessed it was the Parliament building. Sure enough, it was. Today, we got a few pictures.



Sue and one of the dogs in front of the guard shack




Lauren and one of the guards

We took the picture of Lauren and one of the guards, first, and then it just seemed a shame not to recognize the ever-present dog in a picture, too. I volunteered to be the dog's admirer. We see dogs like this all over Athens, sleeping in almost the same position. There's an identical dog in front of the other guard here at the Parliament building.

The uniforms are modeled after those worn by warriors when the Greeks fought against the Ottoman occupation in the late 1800s, early 1900s. See Evzones in Wikipedia for some fascinating information. The uniforms are quite beautiful, and their history makes them somewhat romantic.

Tomorrow, we must have our luggage out for pickup at 8:00 a.m., then we must be ready to board the HAL bus for the ship at noon. That will give us time for a leisurely breakfast and showers before our real journey begins, 14 days on the Black Sea!  Choosing to come a couple days early and adjust to the time changes was a good idea. We'll probably never come to Athens again; and although we surely didn't spend a lot of time here, we got to see a little bit of what it has to offer. On our way back from our Black Sea voyage, we'll be stopping at a few Greek Islands, so we're not officially through with Greece yet.

We're expecting to have internet access on the Prisendam, but I'm pretty sure it won't happen until after we leave port. We're scheduled to leave around 5:00 Sunday evening, so I hope we'll be online again sometime Monday.

Here's a link, again, to our Athens pictures on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sroesner/sets/72157625074928594/with/5062628816/

October 8 - Friday - Athens - One more picture

From my tiny little Canon SD780 IS, here's a picture of the Acropolis after dark from the rooftop patio of our hotel. I used about a 3.7 optical zoom, automatically exposed 1/8 second, F 5.8, 800 ISO, no flash, no tripod (didn't bring one with us) and nothing good to balance against. Not bad for an inexpensive little camera! And the sight in person is really awesome. Just think about long, long ago ...

October 8 - Friday - Athens

It's always a good feeling when you get off the plane, go to the baggage carousel, and you spot your luggage coming down the line. Whoopie!!! Made it again! It's especially nice when you're beginning a trip, as we are now, and you know that for the next three weeks you will have all the things you planned on having with you - not only clothes, maps, and the necessary things, but also the knitting, reading, and a few art supplies to help make the non-busy times smooth.

We were prepared for rain in Athens, but we found, instead, a lovely day much as it would be in San Diego.

As you can see from the glare in the upper part of the photo, I was looking through the bus window when I took this picture. My mind was somewhere between the airport and Poway, my camera was pointed toward what I could see from the bus window, and the bus was heading to a Marriott in this place called Athens, about half way around the globe from Poway.

Holland America Lines' service getting us from the airport to the Marriott, Marriott's service getting us checked in and physically present in our rooms (at about 10:00 in the morning after an approximately 9:00 a.m. arrival at the airport), and then the hotel's efficiency getting us to their shuttle to take us downtown so we could explore on our own was excellent. Then came the moment we were dropped off by the shuttle driver, and the realization came to us: We're in Athens. We've never been here before. We haven't a clue where to go or what to do. We took a picture of a landmark where the driver dropped us and hoped our brains would catch up later and we'd be able to find our way back. Which we did!

You can see the Acropolis from nearly everywhere in metropolitan Athens. It sits so high above the city, every hotel within miles can advertise a view of the Acropolis, and it wouldn't be false advertising. Although we've seen many, many pictures of it, who would have thought! I wouldn't have.

Today we walked around the part of town known as the Plaka, a mostly pedestrian-only shopping and restaurant area (huge, just huge) and got our bearings. We visited a few churches (you stumble into one around every other corner, just as though someone placed a church there and then promptly forgot it) and one major area of ruins (there are ruins everywhere, too - in fact, every time someone digs in Athens, a new ruin crops up) called the Ancient Agora. The Ancient Agora was once the center of commercial life in ancient Athens - everything was there. As we went, we generally got our bearings. We learned to read the map by finding our current location in our guidebook, moving to another location and then finding that one (backwards from what one might expect, but we find this method effective for us). We even found out that the Marriott shuttle drops us just two short blocks from where the Hop-On-Hop-Off City Tour Bus starts. Finding that location was one of our goals today. Tomorrow we'll hop the shuttle to the Hop-On Bus and hop on up the road to the Acropolis and a few other places of interest to us.

Today, we found an ice cream shop and stopped for a break - that's always a goal for us when we're traveling. We don't eat ice cream at home anymore, so it's really special when we we stumble on a good ice cream shop when we're traveling. We have had more fun accidentally sight-seeing over the years. Guided touring is great, and we've come to prefer it in our older years, but accidental touring adds giggles.

Since our last travels when I was blogging, maybe three years ago, Google's Blogger and Flickr's photos have changed the way they interface, and it seems impossible for me to make them work the way they used to. I haven't figured it out yet. In the meantime, to see all the photos from Athens (those I've posted for today and those I'll post for tomorrow), follow this link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sroesner/sets/72157625074928594/with/5062628816/

Here's hoping the link works! I'll putz around with this for a few days, and hopefully, I'll have it running smoothly soon.