Monday Oct 22, 2012 – Athens

We stopped in Athens for the day and tied up in the port of Pireas, a close 15 minutes from the capital center. We were last here in 1973 when Mary and a group of navy wives came to visit my ship on deployment. We were curious about how much of the city we’d recognize after almost 40 years. There were lots of ships in the harbor including another 8 to 10 cruise ships. The weather was a little cooler, cloudy and in the mid 70’s; perfect for seeing the sights.

Our tour went first to the Acropolis, ancient marble ruins high on a hill, visible from almost anywhere in the city. The most famous of the buildings is the huge Parthenon, erected in the 400’s BC. It turned out the Acropolis is about the only thing we recognized from the city, and it hasn’t changed much in the last 2,500 years.

We climbed up the side of the Acropolis hill, but it started to shower so we didn’t stay long. The worn marble steps leading up were slippery enough even when they were dry. We waited for the rest of the tour crowd to come back down and headed to our next stop, the temple of Poseidon, which was about an hour drive south of the city along the coast line. After we cleared the city limits the coast line view out of the bus window was terrific.

With all the economic problems the Greek people have been facing, we halfway expected the city might be a mess of litter and graffiti. But everything looked very nice, good for them!

Our ship left port around 7:00 PM and went south to clear the Greek mainland, then turned right, passed the heel of Italy’s boot into the Adriatic Sea. We’ll be spending Tuesday at sea heading north in the Adriatic with Italy on our port side and the ex-Yugoslav countries to our starboard. We’ll arrive in Venice (last stop) on Wednesday afternoon and have a night in the city before we debark on Thursday morning. I’ve booked a couple of nights at a city hotel so we can spend a little time exploring Venice before we catch our flight back to Philly on Saturday.

My next post will likely be from the hotel, their internet has to be better than the ship’s. I’ll try to post our travel pictures on my Flickr page before we head home. I’ll let you know when I get that done in case someone wants to take a look.