lynneandmark

(Mark here) Well we're in Athens and are heading home tomorrow night after one more day in the city. We arrived here on Monday afternoon and have seen a lot of great places in the past few days. Unfortunately we've been unable to reach the travelblog site for the past few days, and now we're able to reach it, we have no way of uploading pictures on this computer! We'll get online once we arrive back stateside and put pictures up then. Until then, we are off to enjoy some Ouzo with some friends who are heading home in the wee hours of tonight.... read more

Hello everyone: We're actually back home in the U.S. now (it's January 14th), but we didn't have access to the travelblog for days. So, we're creating a few more days of blogposts and adding pictures to our previous posts. Check 'em out! January 7th was our final day in Kalavrita. We overslept and missed the bus trip to the ski lodge, so we had breakfast in town and then walked to areas we had not yet visited. We should give you a little history about Kalavrita, as it will help to explain the places we visited today. Kalavrita is officially 2001 years old, but there were settlers in this area hundreds of years B.C. It is a beautiful and somewhat isolated mountain town, with a history of revolts during oppressive times. Kalavrita is now known as ... read more

UPDATE: added pictures on 14-January. The move to the Domatia was very wise - even though it's more expensive, we had a good night's sleep and a somewhat warm shower. It seems that the hot water supplies are very low, so we'll try to space our showers out to odd times in the day, in hopes of getting a hot shower! The showers we've found in Greece are generally a very small square space maybe about 3 feet square that only rises up a couple of inches, a shower curtain to pull around yourself, and a faucet with a hand-held hose. Mark attended conference events while Lynne took a daytrip with the families of other conference members. The bus took them past the Corinth canal area, but they stayed in the Peloponnese and headed to Epidaurus. ... read more

(FYI: pictures added on 7-January! Updated with smaller-sized but more photos on 14-January.) We arrived safe and sound (and on time) in Athens today. Chartered busses picked us up, along with 120 other conference attendees and families at the Athens airport. They shuttled us to the small ountain town of Kalavrita in the Peloponnese region of Greece. Along the route, we stopped at the Corinth Canal. Emperor Nero began construction of this canal in order to allow ships to pass between the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs. Before the Corinth Canal was finished (final construction was completed between 1882 & 1893), ships wer unloaded on one shore of the isthmus, dragged 4 miles across a paved slipway, and refloated & reloaded on the other side. The canal is about 75 feet wide, which is too narrow for ... read more

Hello everyone, and happy new year! Mark and Lynne are off to their next adventure in Greece. We will be staying in Kalavrita and various cities in the Peloponesse region, and also will have several days in Athens. We're not sure when we'll have access to a computer for our first week of the 12-day trip, but we'll make sure to get you up to speed on our travels whenever we find internet access. Our flight today will take us to a short stopover in Amsterdam, and then we head to Athens. We will be brought to Kalavrita for the start of our festival. We're not exactly sure where we'll be and what we'll be doing in our first few days, but we're sure it will be fun. ... read more

Tuesday was quite a day. While we had a lot of frustrating moments, we experienced some wonderful hikes and terrific moments. We had breakfast at Nicely's Restaurant, which has an awesome homemade oatmeal breakfast - perfect for getting a lot of energy. We needed it for our morning adventure, which went a little differently than planned. We drove to the Black Point area, on the northeastern edge of Mono Lake. Mono Lake is very flat here, and you can see out to the two islands. Apparently, California diverted a lot of water from this lake to San Francisco for years. It got to the point where the lake was drying up, and a sand bridge emerged from the lakebed to one of the small islands. This allowed coyotes to get to the island, which stopped birds ... read more

Hello there! We're back home now, but I thought I'd offer a word of advice to travelers who are going to Cambodia (particularly to Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor). We managed to get a very bad case of food poisioning while in Siem Reap. We're not sure where we ate the bad food (our guess was at a lunch stop at an outdoor place outside of Banetay Srei). Let's just say that the food poisoning was so bad, Mark was unable to fly out of Cambodia on the 4th, so we spent an extra night there and came home a day late. We had an outstanding experience at the Naga International Clinic in Siem Reap. The doctor there was just fantastic. Not only did she take very good care of Mark medically, she also ... read more