Ancient Sites.....

Saturday, April 16th:  Epivardos and Mycenae

Today was a wonderful day. We drove to the town of Epivardos and along the way, stopped to take a look at an old bridge from the Mycenaean age. Right after we finished, along came a man with with his herd of goats down the road. Now the roads are barely wide enough to handle two way traffic and are very curvy with steep embankments on the down-hill side. So it was with quite some amazement that we watched this herd of goats meandering down the road.   After the man got to a bit of a wide spot, he herded the goats off to the side and let all the buses and cars go by before he took them into the street again to make their way to...better pastures? :~) Anyway, we were charmed.

Next was the ancient theater of Epivardos, the largest intact theater in Greece from the Classical Age. It was huge! It has perfect acoustics, kind of like the pyramids at Chitzen Itza, so that if you stand in the center you can be heard all the way to the top. I tried to get my girls to say a poem or something, but they wouldn't.  With no other choice, I climbed down to call for Megan's sweet Romeo...."Romeo, Romeo, where art thou Romeo!"  After all, how often does one get to perform at an ancient greek theater in Greece?

Next we went on to the ruins of Mycenae. This is when we started to have problems with our GPS unit. We had, unfortunately, decided to be cute and name our GPS Helen, as in Helen of Troy. Well, Helen apparently did NOT want to go to Mycenae. Whether it was Menelaus or Agamemnon she did not want to see, we are not sure, but go, she would not.

Well, after asking for directions a couple of times, we eventually got close enough to follow the signs to the site. It was really great. I loved the ruins, the famous lion gate (did you know that they think the heads probably faced out towards the visitors and may have been of gold or some other metal as there are rust marks on the marble), and the landscape of the area. It was just special to see something that we have studied in person like that. Of course that has been true of most of the trip, but this made it really seem like Greece to me.

Unfortunately, they closed the site early and we did not get to go to the museum, but the site was the best part anyway. The funniest part was when we climbed down 99 steps to the water cistern in the dark. Anne, Kayla, and Lauren really wanted nothing to do with this, but Megan and I kept encouraging them on. None of us really knew exactly what to expect when we got to the bottom, but all the way down Anne kept saying that this was a "really bad idea".  And honestly, from a practical point it was. It was pitch black, stone steps, wet steps, wet walls, slippery steps, uneven steps....well, you get the picture. But Megan and I were in it for the adventure and down we plunged leaving the others little chance to turn around and still save face.

So it was with some horror that Megan and I flashed our camera (our light source) down the steps and what showed up was a stone wall. Yep. A stone wall. I was not quite sure what to say to Anne, since we had essentially forced her to risk her neck on this adventure, but before I could figure out something to say, Megan happily piped in that there was nothing down there. Well, the cat was out of the bag and the rest was not pretty,....so I will move on......

The weather today has been rainy. I was quite worried that we would be too hot here, but that was not something I should have worried about. However, I am not complaining about the rain. It rained on the drive to each place, stopped long enough for us to tour the site, then started raining again on the way to the next stop. After we got back to our hotel, it really rained, but we had left overs, so we just stayed in and got a little extra rest.

Oh, and just to let you know, Helen was happy to leave Mycenae and happily took us back to Nafplio..... hmmm......