Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Italy/Greece : Day 12 - Olympia -> Delphi

I've been procrastinating on writing up this day... this is a HUGE DAY! My apologies to all those who have been waiting...

Wake-up at 6:20am. It is so HOT and STILL. We took a short bus ride to the ruins at Olympia. It was a HUGE site!


Our guide gave us a VERY thorough overview of the site and the first Olympic games (very thorough as in, "Is she ever going to stop talking so we can look around?!")



Doesn't this look like an important place? Like where they would light the Olympic torch?

Nope! That is a fountain. Right in front of the fountain is Hera's Alter where they light the torch every Olympics. It's certainly not much to look at.

Here's the Olympic stadium!

Cheryl and I raced through the Olympic stadium. I think she jumped the gun...

Chris took that picture of us starting, then he took off after us (wearing flip-flops) and passed me before we reached the other end of the stadium. He almost passed Cheryl too. Yeah, Cheryl beat me. But I beat her back! Long distance running has it's advantages!

We never said we were racing up AND back, but that just makes sense, right?... I declare myself the winner! hehehe...

The museum was very nice. We saw the famous statues of Nike and Hermes:

The museum was full of other statue pieces and nick-nacks.



Chris was fascinated with all the little toys:


Now, it's back on the bus to Delphi. And a long ride it is! We have to leave the peninsula and head to mainland Greece.


We stopped a couple of times on the way to Delphi. Our first stop was a fort where the battle of Lupanto was fought. This major battle kept the muslims from entering Europe.


It really is a beautiful spot!


Our next stop was for lunch in Itea. It's at the foot of the Delphi mountain.The food in Greece is wonderful. Cheryl and I shared a Greek salad and stuffed tomato.


We had some time after lunch to mess around. Here we are trying to remember how to play checkers. It's Jim and me against Cheryl and Chris. We were doing all right until Jim had to jump Cheryl, hahaha! Too bad you can't see the older couple from New Zealand sitting on a bench laughing at us, lol!

We even had time to get our feet wet before climbing back on the bus.

I'm going to stop the commentary here and continue with Delphi in another post. This is already a HUGE post and the day isn't over YET!

2 comments:

  1. Wonderful pictures! Thanks for sharing the story about Chris beating you in the race. That was funny! The buses look really fancy. That was surprising.

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  2. LOVE LOVE LOVE all the photos I cant WAIT til you can scrap them! LOVED the race story! :)

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