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Old Kardamyli in the Morning
Wish we had gone stomping around back there, looked interesting. We just finished dinner at Goody's, a fast food knock-off next to the Holiday Inn here on Odos Attiki near the Athens Airport. The hotel is okay, they tried very hard to make it a Star Trek type of place, ugly from the exterior, the interior will be dated very soon. The Goody's place was okay. We drove a total of 950 kilometers over the last two days, about half of them coming today, at altitudes up to 1600 meters and torrential rain. I have had enough of driving for a while. The car, a Hyundai Accent, in the event I neglected to mention it struggled direly to hit the 130 km/h, about 80 MPH on the home stretch from Corinth to Athens.
First Toes in the Aegean
We did not have time to stop at Neda Falls but Jennifer was able to dip her feet into the Aegean, or perhaps at this point it is the Adriatic, near Kyparissia. The beach was red as most of the earth is around here and was rocks and pebbles, the water very cold. Does not bode well for our swimming in Santorini two days from now! Olympia was by the far
Kadramyli Coast Line
I don't think we were in the Mani technically anymore. most tourists we have seen in Greece, the place was swarmed with tour busses. Whereas in the remote areas we had become accustomed to seeing only French, here we saw droves and droves of Americans and Germans. The whole town has been designed as a bit of a tourist trap to capture these arriving camera-toters. You kind of have to see Ancient Olympia because it is the site where Zeus was worshipped and then the games were held in his honor starting in the 5th Century BC (don't hold me to that). The torch is still lit on this site before each Olympic Games ever since the Berlin games of 1936. You should know that the lighting of the torch was not really something that was done in antiquity. The facilities and programming were nonetheless very impressive and attested to the wealth of the city-states that participated in them. Not much remains but enough does so that you can picture how it may have looked at the time.
Driving in Greece . . . errr, Dodging Death rather
Returning to Athens required that we cross all of the Pelopponesian peninsula which took about 4 hours, half of the
Red Beach in Kalo Nero
Very rocky, Kalo Nero beat Santorini to the punch with its own red beach. The water is very cold! time was covering a quarter of the distance in the mountains near Olympia. These mountains made our earlier crossing from Napflio to Sparta appear as nothing.
Finally, some insight on Greece from our perspective - they have the most plentiful and cleanest of all restroom facilities you will find anywhere in Europe, even better than the US in many instances, but many of them drive like lunatics which would be okay save for the fact that there is absolutely NO coherent signage on the roads, some of it is just dead wrong and there is no numbering or naming system for the roads which means there is no way of identifying the road you are on except to figure out what towns you are passing, IF the town even has a sign (one third of the time, they do not). Lastly, what I was afraid would happen did happen, we drove that little Accent for all that way with nary an issue except for the fact that it was a clunker to start with with scratches all over it, when I returned it, the guy showed a scratch on the fender and said that was new. I was careful
It just LOOKS cold
At Kalo Nero Beach when we checked it out and was noted every scratch but they guy told me he had it and he knew what to identify. It may be that the scratch happened while I had it unbeknownst to me, but knowing where I parked, etc. I am willing to bet serious money it did not. So for those renting in Greece, BEWARE, they will run their little scams, I really think this is one. This thing had so many scratches I probably could not have counted them all had I fought the guy who checked us out two days ago. Oh well. Conde Nast Obudsman will be hearing from me. Thrifty stinks in the US, why did I expect any different in Greece?
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