HOLY LANDS #1

Holy Lands Cruise/Tour
October/November 2010
Blog #1
Being away from home for almost three weeks would be a lot more fun if one didn’t have to pack and plan on what to wear. With a week or so of worrying and deciding, we managed to get ourselves together in time and began our trip to the Holy Lands and their neighbors in the Mediterranean.
We have learned from past experience that we don’t want to miss anything on our travels if we can help it. Since our cruise on the Pacific Princess began in Athens, Greece and ended in Venice, Italy, we arranged our flight schedule so that we could spend several days in each of these wonderful places before and after our cruise.
Our flight took us through London’s Heathrow Airport where we had a longer than usual lay-over. Our upgraded status to Business Class allowed us the privilege of “camping out” in the American Airlines Ambassador lounge where drinks and food are always available as well as some wonderful recliner lounges; all of which we took full advantage. We arrived in Athens early in the morning and checked into the Hilton Hotel for a few hours sleep before we began an afternoon tour.
We chose a tour to Cape Sounion (pronounced by the locals as Sonya) that took us along the Aegian Sea coast south of Athens to the southern most point in Europe and the site of the the Temple of Poseiden. Poseiden was the Greek god of the sea and the temple was a place visited by sailors for centuries. The sailors visited the temple before leaving on a voyage to pray for safe passage and again at the end of a voyage to bring offerings of thanks for the safely completed voyage. An interesting story was told about the origin of the temple. Aegus, the King of Greece for whom the surrounding sea was named, had a son who was anxious to “get out of Dodge” and sought permission to sail to Crete where a beastly Minator needed to be slain. King daddy wasn’t to keen on the idea but the Prince finally got his way. The King provided the ship and crew and asked only that his son take two sets of sails; one black and one white. The prince was asked to sail away with the white sails and return with the black sails only if the mission was successful and the son was returning alive. The son sailed away, slew the Minator, and returned forgetting to change to the black sales. When the King spotted the returning ship flying white sails, he became distraught and threw himself off the cliff at Cape Sounion. The forgetful son built the temple to honor the memory of his father and the future safety of sailors. The current site is duly protected by fencing to keep tourists from adding to the ravages of weather over the intervening centuries. There is no record of when the fences were erectected but it was obviously not soon enough. Lord Byron, who loved to visit Greece, managed to carve his name in the temple stone some time in the early 19th century.
An all day cruise to three islands within a few hours of Athens sounded like fun so we signed on. We cruised first to the island of Hydras, about two and half hours from the Port at Athens. The quaint little island boasts no cars and a quiet place where vacationers can find some peace and quiet. There were several jewelry stores and art galleries to indicate that folks actually come to the island to do more than ride donkeys that provided the only means of transportation on the tiny island. Hydra is famous among travelers for it’s wonderful cats who seem to be everywhere. The cats are unique in that they have learned how to read the schedule posted for the arrival and departure of tour boats. A local shop keeper told us that a couple of dozen cats appear out of nowhere about fifteen minute before the arrival of each boat and cluster around the gangway so that visitors can pet them as they pass by. The cats again gather just before the boats leave. We decided it must have something to do with the effort made to bring the donkeys down to the warf just in case someone needs a ride our a load to carry. We wondered around and inspected the jewelry and art like we were prospective buyers before our boat loaded up and headed on to the next island.
The Soronic Gulf was more than just a bit choppy as we were served lunch at a table with four other passengers who spoke nothing but Russian. We tried to strike up a conversation but all we got in response were shoulder shrugs and wagging heads that we interpreted as “niet”. When we left the table after lunch, Bill smiled and offered a “bolshoi spiseba” (a thousand thanks) which gained an interesting reaction from our table mates who now had to wonder if we actually understood what they were talking about during lunch. The choppy sea continued as the staff scurried about distributing little white bags to colorless passengers.
We stopped at the island of Doros for forty-five minutes where our continuing search for cloth patches for Billl’s collection was fruitless. At Regina, the third island, we signed-up for a bus tour that took us to a monastery on top of a hill and through pistachio orchards to a pistachio processing plant. We were shown how the nuts are sorted, cooked and bagged and treated to a taste that left us unimpressed. On the way to and from we learned that the island supports about 17,000 people when all of the vacation homes are occupied. Most interesting is the fact that the island is known historically as the first place in the world where money was used.
On our final day in Athens we opted for a tour of the new (2009) Acropolis Museum, a visit to the Acropolis and a city tour. We were told that the new museum was the product of twenty years work on the part of Greek actress Marie Montouri (sp) who used her fame and the affection Greeks has for her to encourage donations and support for the construction of the Museum. The huge museum houses a great many original relics from the Acropolis and numerous copies, the originals of which are housed in museums outside of Greece. The British Museum in London currently has hundreds of pieces from the Acropolis that the Brits recently announced they would return to Greece. Parts of the museum are built over excavations of what was once Athens thousands of years ago. Where possible, these excavations are covered with glass flooring so that as you walk through the museum there are times when the floor is yet another display of the past.
We learned that the Acropolis is not a building but rather the hilltop site of the remains of several buildings. At one time there were more than a dozen hilltop acropolis’ whose primary function was to be a safe place for citizens to go during an invasion by a war party. The temples were built so that the god in whose honor the temple had been constructed could protect Athenians from harm.
Athens famed Acropolis site contained four buildings the largest of which was the Parthenon, the Temple of Nike (you know, the runner’s god), the Temple of Erestheonus and another whose name we missed. Today only the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus are standing. The Acropolis site at present is covered with thousands of pieces of marble, in every shape imaginable, waiting to be set upright in their original positions once someone decides where they belong. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of tourists visit the site each year and provide an equal number of Athenians with a means of earning a living. Incidentally, most of those visitor folks were on the hill when we were.
Our tour of Athens took us by the Panathinaiko Stadium, the site of the first Olympics in 1896, Hadrian’s Arch, the Roman Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Herodioan and Dionysos Theaters and a whole bunch of younger stuff that passed by before our guide could tell us what she knew about each.
Our bus ride ended at the pier next to the Pacific Princess where we would spend the next couple of weeks without having to pack and unpack each day, our meals would be served without our needing to decide what to fix, the bed would be made each day and, best of all, we won’t have to clean up the dishes after a
Life is great and getting better by the day.
Our love to all,
Gram and Grandpa Bill, Mom and Dad, Dottie and Bill