Vacation 2013 - Egypt & Greece, Day 7 "Journeying Across the Greek Countryside"

Tuesday, April 30, 2013 – Day 7

We had booked the 4-Day Classical Tour of Greece with Meteora, and we were scheduled to be picked up at 7:45 AM outside of our hotel. Francisco wandered over to one of the little cafes and got me a coffee, himself a Coke, and some not terribly tasty potato and cheese pastries.  

It turned out we were waiting in the wrong spot, around the corner from where the bus had pulled up. Good thing we kept walking around the area to check.

Once we boarded the bus, we drove around to pick up a few more people, then we were taken to another bus stop where all the different groups split up into their appropriate tours. We joined a group of close to 20 people whom we would be traveling with for the next few days. Our group was about evenly split between Australians and Americans with an older French-Canadian couple, two Brazilians on their honeymoon, and two Argentinian siblings. George was our tour group leader - he was a man of many words, perhaps too many much of the time. ;-)

Our first stop was the Corinth Canal, which connects the Gulf of Corinth with the Saronic Gulf in the Aegean Sea. It separates the Peloponnesian peninsula from the Greek mainland, so effectively we spent much of the trip traveling across an island.

It was really just a short photo stop and then it was back on the road.
  

Next up was the Theatre of Epidauros, famous for its remarkable acoustics.
   

There was a little museum on site that we walked through.

We had another brief photo stop at the seaport town of Nafplio where you can see a couple of castles.

Lunch was at King Menelaos Restaurant, and we tried the Stuffed Tomatoes and Saganaki. They also had the most delicious Blood Orange Juice here.  Lunch was the only meal not included in our tour, so we had to pay for that ourselves.  George was not very good at explaining this, however. His English was very good, but he kept clarifying that "lunch is paid for", which just made everyone more confused. Someone eventually explained to him that he needed to say "lunch is paid for by you" or something along those lines.

Our last stop was in Mycenae to visit the Archaeological Site and the Tomb of Agamemnon. It was a bit of a climb at the Archaeological Site, but it was quite a view.  This military stronghold was one of the major centers of Greek civilization in the second millennium BC.

The Tomb of Agamemnon, or the Treasury of Atreus, is one of the most impressive monuments surviving from Mycenaean Greece. We could walk inside and just the enormity of this tomb was impressive. 

A brief shopping stop...

and then we got checked in at the Arty Grand Hotel.

We finally had Internet access, so we hopped on our laptop and were amused by Greek Google. 

 George announced that dinner would start at 8:30, which was well over an hour away and I had to restrain myself from whining "But I'm hungry now." Well, at least to people that weren't my husband.  ;-) We hadn't eaten since lunch, and I generally have already had dinner at least a couple hours earlier. I was starved. Dinner was served in a banquet hall where course after course was brought out. I didn't take pictures of all of our plates, but we left plenty satiated. George was even kind enough to share his bottle of wine with me.

Dinner was dragging on and on, so eventually we excused ourselves to get some rest for the early day tomorrow.