It's all Greek to me!

So Nate calls me from work sometime at the beginning of January and asks if I want to go to Greece. Well, of course I do! So I did some calling and found that Donene and Caitlin could watch the boys while we were gone (step one), bought a ticket (step two), and waited a week and a half and boarded the plane to Athens (step three). When we finally got in Athens we got to our hotel and it was less than a mile from the Acropolis, which has the Parthenon and lots of other old stuff. :) Ithought this picture looked like the stadium from Gladiator. Nate didn't think so, but I am saying it is.

Right across the street from our hotel there was the temple of Zeus and Herodian's gate to the city. As you can see it was cold, while we were there. It was interesting to see how advanced they were in their building (most of the ruins dated back to 400 or 500 B.C.) CrazY!

We also went the the OLD olympic stadium. You can see just how excited Nate is at about this point!

Everywhere we go I like to see how that particular country buries their dead (morbid I know). In Greece they have these big marble boxes above ground and most have shrines on top of them.

We stayed in Athens for a day and a half and then started on our way to Volos. This was the city that was close to the air base where Nate was going to be working. We drove for a couple of house and then found that we had to detour off the freeway. So we started our detour and after about an hour we thought we must have gotten lost, but there wasn't another road we could have taken. FINALLY, we got to the freeway again, and there were cops blocking it saying we couldn't get on and had to go on another detour. But while we were there we saw this monster line of tractors on the freeway and thought it was strange. So we get to our hotel and ask the front desk person why all the detours and he told us that every year, this exact week in January the farmers in the area hold a protest against their government for more money for their goods and they use their tractors as blockades on the freeway.

So in Volos there weren't as many people that spoke English so it was a little bit harder for me to get around, especially because Nate ended up working for about 8-9 hours for 3 days, so I was by myself. But one day I got a taxi and rode up to this mountain village called Makrinitsa. It was GORGEOUS! It had cobblestone streets and you had to park your car and walk the streets to the different homes (well that's what I did). The streets zig zagged up and down the mountain. There was a little market that had little shops where everything in them were things that the people had made themselves, so of course I went shopping :).



We stayed in Volos from Sunday until Thursday morning and then left on the train to Athens again. On Friday we were supposed to go on a cruise to some of the Greek Islands, but of course this was the week that the cruise ship was being maintained. So I decided that we should take a ferry, but of course, it was windy and rainy so the ferry's couldn't travel. DANG! (we took a taxi to get tickets for the ferry, and ended up wasting $70 for the stupid taxi ride) So we decided to walk to the top of this mountain, where there was just one little old (ugly) church on the top, but the view was spectacular!



By this time, both of us were ready to go home and were ready to see the boys. It made me happy to hear that they missed us too :)

It was a very fun trip and there were lots of interesting ruins. It was so green everywhere and everywhere you looked there were olive trees. EVERYWHERE! We were surprised to see that they had some pretty tall mountains, we thought it was just going to be rolling hills, but nope, there were mountains. The food was pretty good. Not too sweet or rich. We went to a "tavern" on the sea and had some interesting sea food (this was my least favorite meal).

There were pastry shops everywhere. We wondered how they survived and stayed open because there were so many of them. At almost all the resturants there was Greek salad which was just vegetables, feta cheese (EVERYTHING came with FETA!), and olive oil.

Sorry this is SO LONG :)