We rose early, before daybreak, and left the hotel about 06:30. We had a lot of traveling to do and needed to get an early start if Richard was to have any time at all sketching and painting. I had planned to stop again at the Cleft Way, where Oedipus killed Laius, but didn’t realize we had passed it until we were way on down the road.

Our first stop was at Thebes, and we arrived there at about 08:00. The traffic in Thebes was much worse than I had remembered (but then I hadn’t traveled by car before), and parking was simply impossibly. We did eventually find a parking space, and we started walking to the Archaeological Museum. We stopped on the way and got a cinnamon roll at a local bakery.

When we got to the museum, we learned that it was closed for renovation and expansion. Another major disappointment. We turned around and headed back to the car.

Once again, we were on the road. We stopped for gas, found that we were headed in the wrong direction, turned around and went back through town again. We finally found the right road, hit the major freeway, and were on our way to east Attica where we hoped to visit the ruins at Brauron. The freeway took us through the middle of Attica, barely skirting the outskirts of Athens, and by the new airport. Then the major freeway ended, and we found ourselves traveling on winding local roads, and wondering if we could find our way to Brauron. But the road was well marked, lots of signage, and soon Brauron (Vravrona) was among the destinations listed on road signs.

We missed the entrance to the ruins at Brauron the first time and had torn around and go back.

Inside the entrance to the ancient Brauron archaeological site.

The entrance had almost no parking space except for tourist busses, of which there were none during the time we were there. The site itself is small but quite impressive.

Ancient Brauron

As with all the sites in Greece, recent heavy rains have turned everything green. The site has both stone complexes lying about and standing vertical columns. Just what Richard needed for his sketching. I set about taking short videos and snapshots.

The standing vertical columns formed a stoa or protected walkway.

Stoa (protected walkway) formed of standing vertical columns.

Brauron was initially close to the sea, but the islet has silted up since ancient times and is now quite a bit further inland. Brauron was essentially a finishing school for girls. Girls from all over Attica attended, mostly ones from prominent families, and they were taught to run the homes for their husbands to be. One of the early chapters of volume 1 of The Mysteries is set at Brauron. My main character, Melaina, is there when the Persians invade. The Persians burn Brauron, but my character escapes just in time when Kallias saves her and takes her back to Eleusis.

While walking the ruins, I noticed a girl in dark clothing who reminded me of the young woman from Romania that I met at Eleusis. When she got closer, I could tell that it was indeed her. She was at Brauron with an older woman. The girl from Romania smiled at me, and we talked for a while. She was staying with the other woman on a program called, “Greece on a Couch.”

Brauron - Stoa - Two figures in background are the girl from Romania (dark clothing) and her host.

I talked to both of them for a while, and the Romanian was interested in the nature of Brauron. I told her it was a finishing school for girls and told her the story of Artemis brining Iphigeneia there at the end of Euripides’ play “Iphigeneia Among the Tauri.”  I told them about the girls of Brauron participating in a ceremony called “Dancing the Bear” and that they were called little bears.

Stoa and Girls' Dormitory Rooms

The girls slept on at Brauron in dormatories, which were just outside the stoa. After we talked, the two woman left the site.

Ruins of Girls' Dormitory Rooms.

Once Richard finished his sketching, we were back on the road again and this time headed for Sounion. Once there, we first had a lite lunch at a taverna in the the new visitors’ center.

Sounion Archaeological Site Entrance Complex

It wasn’t there when I was there sixteen years ago. Sounion is at the very most southern tip of Attica. The big attraction at Sounion is the Temple of Poseidon, god of the sea.

Temple of Poseidon from the site entrance.

His temple is one of the best-preserved in Greece with several vertical columns and cross members making a stark presence on the promontory at the edge of the sea.

Temple of Poseidon

Actually, the temple may have originally been a temple for Apollo. When Menelaus returned from the Trojan War, his tillerman dropped dead at this location, and Menelaus put ashore to bury him. Apollo, so the story goes, shot the tillerman with an arrow, and he dropped dead instantly.

Temple of Poseidon

Legend has it that Lord Byron carved his name on one of the columns. According to one of the guides at the site, it is on one of the following blocks:

Lord Byron's Signature?

I will try to enhance the image in PhotoShop, and see if I can find it there.

(I have enhanced the portion of the image that I believe shows the name “Byron.” Here it is:

"Byron" etched on the column?

Once Richard had completed his sketch, we were on the road again, this time back to Athens. We lucked out and turned on the right street into Athens so that we could get to Avis most easily. We arrived at just after 18:00. Avis was still open, and we returned our car without incident. Our four-day journey by car about the mainland had ended. Our room was waiting for us at hotel Adams.

The Akropolis from our hotel room balcony.

We grabbed a gyro at a fast food taverna in Plaka and turned in early. A very long day, but mostly successful.

Just a few words on how I’m doing physically. I have myalgic encephalomyelitis or, as it has been know in the past, chronic fatigue syndrome. (Interesting article on the cause of ME/CFS from the NY Times. Click here.) Long walks up and down hills with a thirty-pound backpack and a fifteen-pound messenger bag strapped to me are not my forte. But during the five months prior to coming to Greece, I lost twenty pounds (I’m now 165 lbs) and had started taking half hour walks around our neighborhood in Healdsburg. But I was not prepared even for that first morning of walking in Athens in the rain. I haven’t had a choice about the amount of physical activity I have to do. Once here, the dye was cast, and I just have to do it and suffer the consequences.

The first few days, my legs and back were extremely sore, so sore that I thought it might be arthritis and not just muscle soreness. After being forced to do all the walking, climbing, and sweating, I’m beginning to feel better. I’m certain that I would not have been able to do this if I hadn’t lost the twenty pounds. I did have some indication that I my ME/CFS was improving before I left home, but I still would have never guess that I would have been able to do what I have done. I didn’t realize what I was up against, or I would have never come. I thought that using the metro and having Richard with me would have reduced my physical demands, and they have helped greatly, but I have walked much further, climbed much higher hills, and carried much more weight than I would have thought possible with my condition.

I have been sorer and much more tired that I would have ever imagined. But the thing is, it doesn’t seem to matter in the long haul. I just do it, to hell with the consequences. I figur that if I die here in Greece, at least I’ll die doing what I love. Instead, all this unbearable physical activity seems to be the therapy I need.

For the last eight years, I have been on a strict vegan diet. I have gone off it several times for as long as two weeks, but have always had to suffer swollen joints and an assortment of neurological symptoms. For the first few days, I tried to follow the vegan diet as much as possible but gave in when it became too difficult. The last few days I’ve totally gone off the diet, eating a lot of pork (really bad) and other dairy products. (Yes, real ice cream is better than soy ice cream.) I do have more joint tenderness, although I must say that my knees are better that I’d thought they’d be. Perhaps the total effect of eating animal products hasn’t manifested yet.

The one thing I do notice about animal products is that they seem a little nasty. I never get that on the vegan diet. Raw eggs (as that this morning for breakfast) just seem nasty. Meat always seems to have a little smell of rot about it. Flies seem much more interested in what’s on my plate than they do when I’m eating vegan. Plus my bathroom routine is going in the wrong direction, and it seems that my lower abdomen isn’t as comfortable as it used to be. It seems that my IBS may be returning. I’ll have eleven more days to continue this experiment.

A couple of years ago I had to go off caffeine because it caused my heart to palpitate. This is one part of my diet that I am maintaining.

We rose early, had a rather bad breakfast at the hotel (the eggs were not hard boiled, yuck), and got to ancient Delphi by eight-thirty.

The Sacred Way leading to the Temple of Apollo.

To our surprise, it was free, no admission fee. Since Richard wanted to get started sketching early, we walked directly to the Temple of Apollo. Or at least we tried to. It was roped off with a sign that said, “The Temple of Apollo and everything above it are closed due to technical difficulties.

Temple of Apollo. As close as we could get because of falling rocks.

This was our first major disappointment. I just couldn’t believe we couldn’t see the Temple of Apollo. All this for “technical difficulties”? I was so mad, I could barely stand it. I took a couple of pictures of ruins that we had access to, but my heart wasn’t in it.

Treasurery of the Athenians - where the Athenians' gifts to Delphi were stored.

We walked back to the front gate, and I asked the woman about the problem. She told me that two weeks ago they had a major rock slide and that rocks were still coming off the mountain. “It is very dangerous,” she said. This helped to alleviate my anger. They hadn’t closed it arbitrarily after all. Anyone could quite easily be killed up there.

The Castalian Spring close by was also closed for the same reason. We looked through the bars of the gate and could see some of the large boulders that had fallen from the mountain.

Castalian Spring. Where Apollo killed the dragon, and where pilgrims cleansed themselves before posing a question to Apollo.

Another disappointment. That is where Apollo, while still a child, killed the dragon occupying the spring. He used a bow and arrow. But the Temple of Athena Pronau just down the mountain and across the road was open.

Temple of Athena Pronaia - Tholos

It is a marvelous circular structure, a tholos, that has mystified archaeologists for many years. They are not quite sure of its purpose. It doesn’t really fit the traditional form of a temple. While I took a few videos and snapshots, Richard settled down to sketching. He planned to do a couple of sketches and then return to the Temple of Apollo to sketch a few more.

Temple of Athena Pronaia - Tholos

After finishing my photography, I returned to our hotel room where I stayed all afternoon catching up on writing for my blog. I started to notice a rumbling in my stomach that rapidly developed into dysentery. When Richard returned, I stayed in the room while he returned with gyros for us. I never really felt sick, but the bathroom problem continued. I made it fine through the night and then realized that it was the mousaka. When I was in Greece sixteen years ago, two friends I met from the Netherlands had the same problem after eating mousaka.

I sat in the hotel room thinking about my disappointment at not being able to see Apollo’s temple. In one of the opening chapters of the third volume of The Mysteries, one of my major characters has to leave Delphi. He has grown up there but is no longer safe at the temple and must leave. My own problems of not being allowed into the temple now seemed to mimic those of my character at having to leave. Although I was allowed in sixteen years ago, the same age as my character when he gets kicked out of Delphi, I was no longer welcome. Apollo had kept me out.

The town was deathly still that night when we went to sleep. But just before midnight, someone on a motorbike started blasting through town and making a racket so loud, it rattled the walls. This continued for a hour or so when an automobile with a loud muffler also blasted through town, turned around, and blasted back through. This kept us awake for a couple of hour, and then the town returned to its deathly stillness.

Wednesday morning we rose early and got down to breakfast at 7:30. They served us each of us a hard-boiled egg, Greek bread and butter and jelly. The ruins are two kilometers from town, so we drove. It was cool but not cold, and the wind was really blowing by the time we entered the Lion Gate, the entrance to Ancient Mycenae.

Lion Gate - with headless lions.

Richard and I walked once around the ruins to get our bearing, and then he went back outside the Gate and set to work sketching it. I photographed the grave circle where Schliemann found the gold masks on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Grave Circle - Where gold masks were found.

I filmed it with my camcorder, and then went around a second time to get stills. When I was here before, I missed the tombs of Agesthus and Klytemnestra, so this time I made sure where they were by asking the gate keeper. (Sorry, no pictures. I will post videos of these sites after I return to Healdsburg.)

When Richard finished his etching of the Lion Gate, he and I visited the two tombs, and then discussed whether we wanted to stay longer. He didn’t really want to sketch anything else, so we took a quick look at the Treasury of Atreus, which was walking distance down the road, piled back in the car and headed on northeast.

The biggest change in driving in Greece has been the bridge at Rion. When I was in Greece sixteen years ago, I had to take the ferry across the Gulf of Corinth, but a few years ago, they built a bridge across the same section of the Gulf. It’s a beautiful expansion bridge and one of the longest in the world. It really makes traveling from the Peloponnese to the mainland a breeze. (Also, no pictures. Video coming at a later date.)

We were running so short on time, or at lest I felt that we might be, and with the possibility of us not getting a hotel room looming, we decided to forego Missoulongi, not see Lord Byron’s monument, and instead took the road in the opposite direction to Delphi. This was a major disappointment for me, but I was getting concerned that we might not be able to find accommodations in Delphi. Our trouble finding a hotel room when we first got to Athens was still weighing on me.

We arrived at Delphi at four in the afternoon. I wanted to get a room in Hotel Athena, where I stayed sixteen years ago. We made one pass through town, parked the car and walked along the street until I found it. We went inside, and soon the woman who ran the place came to greet us. I immediately recognized her as the woman who had waited on me sixteen years before. I asked her and she confirmed that she was there. She really didn’t seem to have aged much. Still quite pretty. A room was only 35EUs, so we took it. It may be the same room I had before.

Delphi from our hotel room.

It has a balcony that extends out over the gorge, and the drop-off to the valley below gives me such a sense of vertigo. Quite an amazing place to spend the night.

We asked the woman who waited on us to recommend a place to eat, and she told us to go to Taverna Spiros. We had a dinner of Greek salata, Mousaka, and souvalaki. After we got through eating, we returned to our room where we retrieved my notebook computer, and then we went to an Internet café to get my email.

Then we came back to our room and retired early. A very full day.

We had reserved a car through Avis for Monday. The car would be available at noon on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning, we spent the time waiting for the car by going to the New Akropolis Museum. It was built and opened for the Olympics in 2004, which were hosted by Greece. One primary purpose in building the museum was to get the British to return the so-called Elgin Marbles, which Lord Elgin took from the eves of the Parthenon in 1902. England has said in the past that they would not return the marbles because Greece had no facility suitable for them. Since Greece built the museum, England has been silent on returning the Elgin Marbles.

While in the museum, we again looked for sculptures of Kore (Persephone) for more information on how to depict the priestess of Kore for the illustration on the front of the first volume of my novel, The Mysteries. However we were not allowed to take any pictures while inside. The museum also contained the original Kariatid statues, which had been replaced by duplicates on the Akropolis exposed to the elements.

After leaving the museum, we walked to Adrianou Street where we bought gyros from a fast food restaurant, sat on a bench in the shade, and quickly ate them.

Once we had our rental car, we started south toward Piraeus. We had planned to go from Athens to Sounion and then to Brauron; however, Richard mentioned that, since we had not yet seen Eleusis, and it being our primary objective, it might make more sense to do our car excursion backward from the way we planned it. Our first stop would then be Eleusis. This was an excellent idea, and I immediately agreed. So at Piraeus, we turned north-west and got on the major highway to Eleusis. After about an hour, during which we made a couple of wrong turns, we were there.

Ruins of Ancient Eleusis from inside the Main Gate

I cannot adequately describe the feeling I had when I entered the gate to the magnificent ruins at Eleusis.

Homes of the Priestesses

I had spent two years writing the first two volumes of The Mysteries, and thinking about Eleusis monopolized my life during that time. Now, I am about to write a third novel about Eleusis, and it will be monopolizing the greater part of my thoughts for the next year or two.

Ruins of Ancient Eleusis

I first shot videos of the entire site, and then I went around again using my snapshot camera.

The Entrance to the Underworld

I was amazed to see that all the places in which I am most interested were marked with placks: the priestesses’ quarters, the home of the Kerykes, and the Anaktorion, the holiest of holies, which was inside the Telesterion (the initiation temple).

The Telesterion - The Initiation Temple

I also climbed the hill to the Church of the Virgin Mary, which was no longer in service, and in fact appeared to be abandoned. While up there, I saw a  young woman also climbing the hill. When she got there, I said hello, and asked her where she was from. She said, “Romania.”

The girl from Romania standing at the top of the hill.

She and I talked for a while, and then I went back down the hill.

Abandoned Church of the Virgin Mary

Location of the Anaktorion - The Holiest of Holies, where the initiates witness the Sacred Objects

I walked back through the ruins again, and sat for a short time on the Mirthless Stone where Demeter had set while searching for Kore.

The Mirthless Stone

Richard sat in the shade of a tree and sketched the ruins. While I was inside the grotto, the girl from Romania joined me. I told her about the grotto being the ancient entrance to the Underworld. She was on her way back to Athens. She was disappointed because she only just got to Eleusis and it was about to close. She’d wanted to spend more time there.

The ruins were only open until 15:00, so we were soon on our way to Mycenae. We had to get off the main highway to Patras at Corinth to go to Mycenae, and we handled this just fine. However, we also had to turn off the major highway to go to Mycenae, or Mykinai, as the small town outside the ruins is known. We made a wrong turn at my direction and ended up going nowhere. We backtracked for a while, found the right road, and were soon in Mykinai. I have tried to retrace my sixteen-year-old footsteps, and generally that means staying in all the same hotels, although that certainly didn’t work out very well in Athens. In Mykinai, I had stayed in Hotel Clytemnestra, and I soon located it. We parked the car, and Richard and I started up the stairs to the hotel entrance.

Hotel Klytemnestra

Once inside, I saw an elderly man and a younger one watching TV. The elderly man came to me, and I asked if he had a room. He said “Yes.” One with a bathroom was only 40EU, so we took it. We asked the young man if they had the Internet, and he answered, “Yes, WiFi.” Finally, I’d be able to check my email.

View from Hotel Klytemnestra

We retrieved our backpacks from the car, and once we entered the entryway again, the young man was there with the password for Internet access. I told him that I had been there sixteen years ago and that we talked for an hour or so. “What about?” he asked. I then told him that at the time he had been planning to go back to Australia, where he grew up, but that his father was going to be very disappointed if he did. “I did go back,” he said, “and my father didn’t like it.” He then said that he was about to leave again, this time for Stockholm where he planned to setup permanent residence. He’s leaving soon, and this will be his first winter there.

It’s really somewhat amazing that I’ve come back to Greece after sixteen years, and can still find the same people, that I remember their predicaments, and can get an update.

That evening when I got my email, I found out from my cousin in Carlsbad, NM that his mother, my aunt, has cancer and doesn’t have long to live. She’s 90. She and I were quite close during the seven years I lived there. Much of that time, I wrote the first two volumes of The Mysteries. When my aunt passes on, this will make the fourth aunt I’ve lost this year. I also lost my cousin. The passing of the torch to a new generation. It has all happened before, it will all happen again.

After the continental breakfast served by our hotel, Richard went out to see what he could find to sketch, and I went back to our room to write my blog. Since archaeological sites are all closed on Mondays, the only activity we had planned for the day was to visit the National Archaeological Museum, which opened at 13:00. But Richard had only been gone a few minutes when he returned to say that the Temple of Olympian Zeus (ToOZ) was in fact open. So both of us left to explore the site.

Temple of Olympian Zeus with the Akropolis in the background.

I remember being at the ToOZ on my previous trip.

Temple of Olympian Zeus

The grounds were very dry at the time, all the grass brown and dust following in my wake. But it appears that Athens has had some significant rains this fall.

Richard sketching the Temple of Olympian Zeus

Everything is green and the ToOz was no exception. Richard located a strategic place to sketch and paint where he could have the giant columns of the ToOZ in front of him and the Akropolis in the background.

Richard Sketching

I started photographing the site with both my camcorder and point-and-shoot camera. We were extraordinarily pleased to be able to visit the site on the day it is ordinarily closed.

Temple of Olympian Zeus

After our visit to ToOZ, we ate lunch at a street-side taverna (a Greek salata for each of us) and then went to the metro for our trip north to the Archaeological Museum. We got off at Victoria Station and backtracked a couple of blocks to the Museum. They wouldn’t let us inside with our packs, so we dropped them off at the bag check. They did allow visitors to take pictures but not with a flash. I turned off the flash on my Canon PowerShot. We first went to the wall paintings of Akrotiri, which were on the second floor, and we had to go through a maze of rooms to get there. Once we found them, we learned that all of them are  no longer here in Athens. Most of them have been returned to the museum on Santorini. We’ll have to wait until we go there to see the rest.

We next visited the artifacts from Mycenae, which we will be visiting in a couple of days. The Mycenaean exhibit was a little overwhelming. Much more is available for viewing than was sixteen-years ago. We saw the gold death masks found in the grave circles in Mycenae and many other solid gold artifacts. An amazing exhibit.

We also saw many statues of Kore (Persephone, mistress of the Underworld).

Kore (Persephone)

Most of them were found at Eleusis. I took pictures of all these because I plan to have Richard paint illustrations for the covers of all three volumes of my new novel The mysteries. And since my main character, Melaina, is the priestess of Kore, it makes sense to have her dressed in similar garb. She will be on the cover of the first volume.

We also took several pictures of a statue of Hermes. One of my other main characters is Kallias, the torchbearer for the Mysteries of Eleusis. His family, the Kerykes, was supposed to have descended from Hermes. Since Kallias will be on the cover of the second volume of The Mysteries, it makes sense to have him in the likeness of Hermes.

Hermes

The third volume of The Mysteries will have Melaina’s two children, Theanoë and Zakorus, on the cover. They will bear a resemblance to Melaina and also Kallias for reasons I will not reveal now.

I had been wondering if the famous relief of Demeter, Persephone, and Triptolemus that depicts the first sowing of grain was in the museum. We walked into one room, and there it was up against the far wall. It is much larger than I dreamed, standing five or six feet tall. The figures are life-size.

Relief of Demeter, Triptolemus, and Persephone. Triptolemus sewed the first grain.

The relief was etched much deeper than I anticipated, and the figures much more striking. Seeing this was a very pleasant surprise.

Our other activity for Monday was to meet an acquaintance of mine, a Greek woman named Irene. I had never actually met her. We came to know each other on the Internet, when she noticed my scrabble name “David of Crete,” which had been given to me by Mara, Bear’s friend, when we were all playing together. Irene and I have been playing scrabble together for at least three years. She kicks me around the scrabble board quite easily. Anyway, before I left Healdsburg, Irene suggested that we meet on Monday evening for dinner. I’d been trying to reach her ever since we arrived in Athens, but to no avail. Then Sunday afternoon, I got a call at the hotel while I was out, and when I returned her call. Irene wanted us to meet her at the train station at the last stop out of Athens called Kefissia. I asked her specifically if that was the metro, and she told me no, it was definitely the train.

The underground here in Athens has been amazing. They have lots of trains (the metro) that run every few minutes. You never have to wait over five minutes or so. We took the metro to the Monestiriaki district, where Irene told us to catch the train to the Kifissia station, where she would pick us up. We looked around but could find no train station. I asked the man at the kiosk, “trano stathmos?” and he said “Oci.” There was no train station in Kifissia. So we took the metro in spite of what Irene had told us. The last stop on the line is Kifissia.

Sure enough there was Irene waiting for us at the Kifissia metro station. She didn’t realize that what used to be the train is now the metro. The first thing I asked Irene was that if she is Greek why does she speak English so well and with a British accent. “I am Greek,” she said, emphatically, “and I’ll tell you all about the accent later.” With that we climbed in her car, and she took us to a taverna close by.

The taverna was rather nondescript, nothing fancy, tables with white table clothes. Rick and I sat on one side of the table, and she sat on the other. All the time we were entering, she was talking to the proprietor. Then Irene started interrogating about what we wanted to eat. We decided on fish, several kinds, Greek salata and fried cheese.

Irene

Richard asked her about her life. She said that she went to college, married, had grandkids, and worked. Her husband had passed away five years ago. Irene is a very pleasant person, full of jokes, always kidding, and asking questions. She is somewhat reserved when asked questions about herself.

We had a very pleasant dinner, pleasant conversation, later in the meal, Irene said that we should come visit her again this next Saturday when we return from our car excursion about Greece. We thanked her for her invitation, and said that we just might do it. We’ll have to see how things go. We’ll call her by noon on Saturday. If we decide to go, she’ll make dinner for us. She is a very pleasant person to be someone who likes to beat me up so badly on Internet Scrabble.

Our goal for our second morning in Athens was to go to Eleusis. A Greek friend of mine, Irene (lives in Athens but I had never met her), told me that the archaeological sites would be closed on Sunday. However, we learned that the Akropolis was open, so we assumed that Eleusis would also, so we walked to Plataea Eleutheria and caught the bus to Eleusis. We had quite an adventure buying tickets, because they gave us two tickets each and they were much cheaper than our guidebook said they’d be. We also validated them wrong, as in upside down, which drew a frown from several people. But finally, we were on our way to Elefsina where the ruins of ancient Eleusis reside.

Once in Elefsina, we walked too far along the waterfront—commercial ships and cranes lining the docks—and had to retrace our steps, then turned inland up a street that gradually became a very nice mall-like area (tavernas and banks) to the right, with the fenced ruins to the left. We finally made it to the entrance only to find that it was in fact not open, much to my consternation. I filmed the ruins through the fence as much as possible, but I was horribly disappointed and wondered if I’d ever get to set foot inside.

Eleusis - The Entrance to the Underworld.

And the ruins, to my way of thinking, were absolutely gorgeous: lots of marble blocks cast about, some with inscriptions, some with architectural details. But the central feature that defines the ruins from the entrance is the prominence of the grotto, the ancient entrance to the Underworld. This dark hole in the side of the hill loomed over the site.

I photographed what I could through the fence, and then reluctantly, we left for the bus back to Athens. I was heartbroken. To top it all off, after we exited the bus, and it had driven away, I realized that I had left my hat on the bus. Discouraging, very disappointing.

We walked Plaka for a while and then went to our hotel room, so I could sulk (writing in my blog actually). Richard went out to sketch. But in the late afternoon, just at sunset, Richard and I went out again and walked past the Arch of Hadrien to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, even though it was closed.

Temple of Olympian Zeus

Richard painted a marvelous watercolor of the Temple looking through the fence. That evening, we walked around Plaka for a while and turned in early.

Temple of Olympian Zeus

A day of disappointment at Eleusis, saved by the glorious sight of the Temple of Olympian Zeus glowing in the dark.

Arch of Hadrien with the Akropolis in Background as seen from the Temple of Olympian Zeus

On Saturday morning when we first arrive at the Athens International Airport, we spent our time in the terminal, and even got on the internet for a short time period, although our iPhones couldn’t find it. We had one panic. Richard noticed that he didn’t have his jacket. He thought that he must have left it on the plane, which in fact turned out to be the case. After a state of quiet panic passed between us, he decided to go back to Passport Control to see if he dropped it there. I stayed in a coffee shop at the side of the thoroughfare while he was gone. He was gone for quite a while, but when he returned he said that they had located it on the plane, and that he was working getting it back. A few minutes later he was reunited with his jacket. One disaster averted.

Athens New International Airport

After positing on the Internet during the time we were allotted (45 min), we went outside and across the street to the Metro. The metro is a huge circular building with exits to the different platforms where passengers board the metro. However, we were the only ones there. This was five-thirty in the morning. We finally located an open ticket widow, and talked to a man about getting a three-day ticket, which was 15EU apiece.  The first metro to downtown Athens was at 06:31, so we had a while to wait.

The metro is very new and whisper quiet. Took about forty-five minutes to get to Syntagma (Constitution) Square. Greece had a surprise waiting for us when we got off the metro. It was raining. Several hawkers were already at the exit with clusters of umbrellas to sell. We have one umbrella between us, so we broke it out and stepped out into the light pitter-patters.

The rain was slow at first but increased as we traveled south to Plaka. A few streets down, we turned right along the street where our guide book Let’s Go! said the Hotel Phaedra should be. It wasn’t there. I had stayed at Hotel Phaedra when I was here sixteen years before, but the area now looked completely different. With the rain increasing and Hotel Phaedra nowhere in sight, we decide to try another that we ran into, Hotel Adonis. The woman at the desk was quite curt with us. “You should have made reservations,” she said. “We have nothing, and you’re not likely to find a room anywhere else either.” We stepped back out into the rain totally demoralized.

We continued to look for Hotel Phaedra, but it didn’t seem to be anywhere in the area, and the people we stopped to ask about it had never heard of it. We kept crisscrossing streets, but the area looked so strange, and even the address given by Let’s Go! just didn’t seem right to me. I thought that perhaps Greece had changed so much during the rebuilding for the 2004 Olympics that everything I remembered was gone. I was quite shaken by this and thought myself a fool for believing that I could come to Greece without reservations. But it was more than that. I had spent so much time reading and writing about Greece that I had felt really close to the place. Now, it appeared, it had taken on a new face and was no longer the Greece I had known. I felt very old and very ignorant.

We tried another hotel, but it had just rented it last room, and that only provisionally, just as we entered. The man said that he had no more rooms, and that we were not likely to find one anywhere. He said to check at Hotel Adams and gave us directions to it. Needless to say, we were in a miserably state, and I was feeling extraordinarily bad about bringing Richard with me and put him in jeopardy also. By this time I was sweating profusely and also wet from the rain. I was very tired.

Hotel Adams seemed not to be where the man told us, but we ran onto it around another bend and went inside. A man was talking to a woman at a desk in the dining room, and we asked him about a room. He was very pleasant, and said that they might have a room, they were just checking and thought they’d made a mistake and actually had a room. He told us to sit down on a couch against the wall. He’d be with us in just a moment.

They searched through their records, and sure enough they did have a room. It was 80 EU per night. We took it immediately with enormous relief. We found out later that it does not offer an Internet connection, but that was a minor problem compared with what had looked like an unsolvable problem. Our room would be ready in about an hour. When I was in Greece sixteen years before, I had learned to not panic when in impossible situations. Then, something always came along to solve every problem. This was still the case. But in the heat of the moment, I had forgotten that.

Richard and I left our bags there in the dining room with the man and woman to look out for them, and we walked out into the street. The rain had mostly stopped. We walked half a block further south, and I noticed an old church on the left, and thought it looked familiar. It was the Church of Saint Catherine and recognized the Roman courtyard in front of it. I looked to the right, and there was Hotel Phaedra, looking the same as it had when I stayed at it sixteen years before. There was the little kiosk just a few yards away. How extraordinary! Plaka itself seemed to suddenly unveil itself. I was back in familiar territory. I told Richard what a tremendous sense of relief had come over me knowing that Greece was still the same Greece I remembered. We walked around Plaka for a while, with me remembering the shops I’d visited, the restaurants lining the streets, and the occasional archaeological site. It felt like a homecoming.

We returned to the Hotel, went to our room, and unloaded our packs, and then struck out for the Akropolis.

The rain had stopped, and the sun was peeking between clouds, but the wind was still blowing. We found the entrance to the Akropolis, bought our tickets and continued inside the gate. The Akropolis is a complex of archaeological sites.

Entrance to the Akropolis site complex.

The walkways are all bricked or paved now, and they were mostly dirt when I was here before. A significant upgrade. The first site of any significance is the Theatre of Dionysus. We stepped into the ancient theatre, took some pictures, a few videos, but we both started to realize that our lack of sleep the last two nights, was really beginning to weigh on us. I had to actually force myself to film anything. Richard realized that he wasn’t up to sketching either. He just didn’t have the mental acuity. We decided to take what pictures we could, but to not expect much of ourselves this first day. We realized that this would probably be our only chance to see the Akropolis, but our intellectual state, or lack there of, could not be helped.

Theatre of Dionysus, where Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides presented their tragedies.

We left the theatre and continued up the walkway to the Temple of Asklepios, which consisted of a few stacked stones. Not much there. We went on the Odion, where Maria Callas, Yanni, and many other artists have performed. We looked down into the ancient structure, which is very dramatic. It seats several thousand.

Odion

From there we continued on up the Propyala, the entrance. A hoard of tourists were going up while another hoard was coming down. The top of the Akropolis is as big as several football fields, and tourists were everywhere. The two main structures are the Parthenon and the Erektheon, another temple of Athena. Parthenia means virgin and stands for Athena, which is the guardian of the city.

Entrance to the Akropolis

Richard tried to sketch while on the Akropolis, but he was so deep into jetlag that it just wouldn’t work. Finally, he gave up and just walked around seeing the sights.

Richard at the Akropolis

When we left the Akropolis, we sent back to Plaka, ate lunch at a very nice street-side restaurant (gyros and Greek salatas), and then went back to our hotel and slept for a few hours. That night, we went back out to walked the streets and ended up climbing the side of the Akropolis to a small hill called the Areopagos.

Areopagos during the day. We climbed it Saturday evening to view Athens at night.

This is where murders were tried in ancient times, and is named for Ares, god of war, who was the first tried there for murder. He had killed a son of Poseidon. Now, it is just one huge marble rock, very slick, and we had to pick our steps carefully. It was very dark at the stop, except for the full moon, but before us was the entire city of Athens, glowing in the darkness. Quite a sight.

Then off to bed.

Greece: October 2009

This is my latest, latest attempt at an itinerary. The trip still has three parts: Seeing Athens on foot, seeing other ruins by car, and visiting a couple of islands (Mykonos and Santorini) by ferry. Sort of a three-act play. Something I just learned, is that Sunday, 4 Oct is election day in Greece, and all the archaeological sites are closed. They are also closed on Mondays. One of the biggest changes in Greece since I was there in the fall of 1993 is the Rio-Antirio Bridge, which connects mainland Greece with the Peloponnese at Patras. This makes traveling to Delphi and then on to major sites in the Peloponnese much easier. Sixteen years ago, I had to take the ferry across the Gulf of Corinth.

I may move up seeing Eleusis to the first Saturday we are there because Eleusis is the cornerstone of my trilogy, The Mysteries, A Novel of Ancient Eleusis. We’ll see.

1 Oct, Thursday: Leave for Greece -
* 16:55 flight

2 Oct, Friday: 11:00 – Arrive at Heathrow in London
* Possible day trip into London
* 21:00 – Leave for Athens

3 Oct, Saturday: Arrive in Athens ~ 2:35 am
* Theatre of Dionysus
* Akropolis
* New Akropolis Museum

4 Oct, Sunday: Athens
* Agora
* National Archaeological Museum

5 Oct, Monday: Athens
* Temple of Olympian Zeus
* Kerameikos – Potters’ Quarters
* Dinner with Irene

6 Oct, Tuesday: Attica by Car
* Rent car
*  Sounion
*  Brauron
*  Marathon
* Late afternoon: Travel to Thebes – Spend the night

7 Oct, Wednesday: Thebes
* Ruins of the Kadmia
* Ruins of Ancient Thebes
* Museum
* Afternoon: Travel to Delphi – Spend the night

8 Oct, Thursday: Delphi
* Temple of Apollo
* Sanctuary of Athena Pronaia
* Spend the night

9 Oct, Friday:
* Travel to Mycenae
* Messolonghi – Lord Byron’s Cenotaph
* Mycenae
* Tomb of Agamemnon
* Tomb of Klytemnestra
* Spend the night

10 Oct, Saturday: Travel to Elefsina
* Ancient Eleusis
* Turn in rental car
* Travel to Athens – Spend the night

11 Oct, Sunday: Aboard ferry
* Travel to Mykonos

12 Oct, Monday: Mykonos
* Mykonos

13 Oct, Tuesday: Travel to Santorini

14 Oct, Wednesday: Santorini
* Ancient Thera

15 Oct, Thursday: Santorini
* Ancient Akrotiri – (may be closed for reconstruction)

16 Oct, Friday: Santorini
* Oia

17 Oct, Saturday: Travel around Santorini – Motorbike

18 Oct, Sunday: Return to Athens

19 Oct, Monday : Return to Healdsburg, CA
* 08:15 Flight to Heathrow
* 13:50 Flight to San Francisco

My son and I attended the King Tutankhaman exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco on my birthday 21 July 2009. No pictures of the exhibit were permitted. It was a terrific show, and you’ll have to take my word for that, although you can visit their site by clicking here. But we did have a very exciting fire alarm that sounded after we had waited through two long lines and were at the interior doors just ready to enter the exhibit. They evacuated the building immediately. Below are a few images I took with my iPhone camera. Notice that the sky is overcast and it’s a little foggy. It was rather cool. As Mark Twain is reported to have said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” Wasn’t all that cold on my birthday, but I did have on a jacket.

Fire Truck Outside de Young Museum

People and Fire Truck Outside de Young Museum

Evacuation of de Young Museum

Getting Ready to Reenter de Young Museum

Reentering de Young Museum