Marvellous Marathon!

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Hello!

We woke this morning about 7 and were down for breakfast fairly soon after that.  The lovely lady that oversees the meal provided us with a carafe of orange juice, some warm crostini with chopped tomatoes and feta cheese, as well as plates of scrambled eggs with “bacon”.  (I’m using “”’s because it’s really more like we would call Canadian bacon or ham.)  At any rate, it was great.  

Lovely town next to Delphoi

Beautiful countryside

Beach at Marathon

As we had already paid the hotel bill when we checked in, we just had to bring our bags down, as the car was parked (still!) directly in front of the hotel.  Actually, from the time I parked it, we hadn’t used it – except to fold in the driver’s side mirror, which seems to be the thing to do around here.  Out of town about 9, driving right into the sun; it was a beautiful day!  As it turns out, the town right next to Delphoi -- called Arachova – is absolutely stunning and would definitely be a great place to stay for anyone visiting the area.  I did want to note that.  

Today’s drive was to take us east toward the sea, and then south to the very end of the peninsula below Athens. 

Athenian at Marathon

R in front of Athenian tumulus

Statute marks the battle site

As our first checkpoint, we used Thiva (Thebes).  They are alleged to have a very good archeological museum, but it has been closed since something like 2010 for renovation.  I kept checking different websites to see if it had reopened, but so far, even with one Greek government site saying they would reopen in 2015, apparently that hasn’t happened yet.  As the Greek economy is in such a state of flux, we weren’t surprised, and gave it a miss. 

The "trophy" from Marathon

Tumulus graves excavated next to museum

Platean tumulus from battle

From Thiva, we next set our sights on Marathon and got there around noon.  I do have to say that signage has been a big problem. 

Our good friend Stew talked about traveling in Greece 30 years ago, and having real problems with road signs.   In my naiveté, I assumed that things MUST be different now, and that Robert at least knew the Greek alphabet, which should help us find things.  Well…let me only say that as far as providing readable road signs, the Greeks are nowhere close.  They also have a very Italian way of having one sign point one way, and then truly, no more signage anywhere!  It’s very bizarre.  Also, we are plagued by the lack of standard spelling of place names.  Maps, guide books, web sites, GPS data simply cannot get together on this.  

At Marathon, Robert first got us to the beautiful beach. 

Driving down coast south of Athens

Beautiful scenery!

The coastline is stunning.  There are oranges all over the trees everywhere.  Really made us thirsty!  From there, we rambled around until suddenly – unexpectedly – we were at the tumulus of the fallen Athenian warriors, and the battle site!  There was a person there to collect our money, but we again had the place entirely to ourselves.  There was a really good site map of the entire area, which showed where some other sites were that we’d wanted to see.  So, first we walked around the mound – this was from the 490 BC battle during the first Persian invasion of Greece.   It was fought between approximately 9,000-10,000 Athenians/Plataeans and a largely superior (numbers-wise) Persian force, estimated to be around 26,000. The Persians were routed, losing approximately 6,400 men, while the Athenians lost 192 and the Plataeans lost 11, according to Herodotus.  

The dead Athenians were cremated on the battlefield, and their remains covered over with a large mound of dirt; the tumulus.  We then followed some very obscure signage down a long and winding road to the small Marathon Museum and much smaller tumulus mound of the Plateans.  The interesting thing about the museum was that there was actually an American high school group there, being lectured by their American instructor!  Just seems odd, somehow. 

Outside of the museum, there was a large building which held seven excavated Early Hellenic graves (ca. 1200 BC), which were beautifully preserved and presented.  It was great to see the effort that had been made to cover the graves, as we are still disappointed in the covering that was done at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.  They could certainly take some lessons from the folks here!  Robert also spotted the tumulus of the Plateans.  Much smaller than the Athenians, but interesting to see, nonetheless.

At this point, it was after 1 pm and we decided to head straight to our “place” near Cape Sounio. 

Kitchen and spiral staircase

Temple at Cape Sounio

Temple at Cape Sounio

We skirted to the east of Athens and reached it about 2:30 pm.  We had heard from our landlord that we should call him when we got close, and he also provided the GPS coordinates.  Emmy got us within great range of our building, and Thanos was with us in a few minutes.

We are staying in a two-bedroom two-bath apartment unit, on two floors.  (And the interesting thing is that they are connected by a spiral stairway.) I was also GREATLY looking forward to having the use of a washing machine, as R is rapidly running out of clothes.  The “top” floor of our place (which really is the main floor, as there is a basement level as well) contains the kitchen, dining area, living room, and one bathroom as well as a large balcony with a view of the sea.  On the lower level are the two bedrooms and the larger bathroom.  And of course, I went first thing to the washing machine!

Fortunately, it is set up very similar to Clothilde’s machine in Lyon, where the wash gets set into a large barrel and the snaps shut on the top.  Unfortunately, though, everything other than “Whirlpool” is in Greek, so I just had to make some educated guesses based on what I did in Lyon.  It did seem to work, though, so now I have two loads completed and drying ALL over the apartment!  There are some wonderful heaters that are heating things up very nicely, thank you, so I think that we may have some clean, dry clothes very soon after all.  

After the first load of wash, we decided to drive to Cape Sounio to see if we could catch the sunset, but we were just a few minutes too late.  Tomorrow night, for sure!  We then drove into Lavrio, the closest town on the coast, where we were able to get $$ as well as some comestibles for dinner tonight.  Definitely an “eat in” kind of night.  So, back to the apartment and relaxing now, about 6:30 pm.  More later!

m

xxx