We’re off to Hawaii with Ashlynne and Paris. Our first leg is in Maui. As usual, I’ve done some whale watching. Not quite as fun this time as the winds have been very very strong – 30-40 MPH out on the water. I’ve felt like Jim Cantore out on the front of the boat. No breaches yet, but here are some pics:
Wow, it’s been a busy return from our trip. Trenna says this was probably our best trip ever. I can’t disagree. Everything went so well and everything we saw and did was just amazing.
Into the Peloponnesus
We’re back in Athens for the last time on this trip, after spending an incredible time in Nafplion, Greece. What an amazingly quaint village in the Peloponnesus region of southern Greece. We drove down on Thursday morning, visiting ancient Corinth on the way, and spent Thursday evening and Friday there. Today (Friday) was (one of) Greece’s Independence Day celebrations, so it was really great to be there during their celebrations. The food was great and the people were so wonderful. Wow!!!
We get up at 3:30AM to go to the airport for a 6AM (11PM Friday Eastern Time) flight to Amsterdam. We have an 8.5 hour layover, so we hope to get into town for a bit and see the sights before flying from there to Atlanta. Looks like we’re supposed to get to ATL at 8:20PM.
I hope to post pics from our last leg in Greece tomorrow.
We’re back in Athens now, but wish we could have spent much more time in Turkey. I loved everything about it! Great people, great food, great sites. And their infrastructure blew me away. Easily the equal of the US.
Here are a few rough pics of what we saw in our quick 48 hours in Turkey:
I’ll write more about the meal we had at Oz Orfa later.
We went to the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus today!!! It was just magnificent! Certainly one of Trenna’s favorite places ever. And very photogenic.
I finally got around to uploading the rest of the pics from Santorini. Wow, that place is so beautiful!!!
We just got to the Doubletree Hotel in Kusadasai. The flight over was great. The airport in Izmir (Trenna discovered that Izmir is the biblical Smyrna, one of the seven churches in Revelation!) was one of the nicest I’ve ever been in. And the very expensive taxi ride from there to here was … very expensive.
Tomorrow morning we’ll figure out the plan for our visit to Ephesus and whatever else we’ll do. There are numerous other ancient biblical cities within 100km of here. I think the right answer is just to come back for two weeks and visit them all. Here’s a good site that lists them. http://www.bibleplaces.com/ephesus/
Well, we just left Santorini and we’re sitting in the Athens airport awaiting our flight to Izmir, Turkey. We’ll get there after dark and have an 80km taxi ride from the airport to Kusadasi, Turkey, which is around 15 minutes from Ephesus. We’re staying at the Doubletree tonight, but not sure about tomorrow night. Playing that one by ear.
I’m slightly more nervous about this part of the trip since it’s much more of an unknown. I’m sure it will all be very interesting. And a learning experience.
From everything I can tell, all of the more dangerous areas of Turkey are over in the eastern border close to Syria and in Istanbul. So everything should be OK.
Santorini is certainly one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. And October seems to be a great time to be here. The crowds are light and the weather very nice, though a little cool for Trenna. I already know we need to come back.
Sorry it has taken me a bit of time to download and review the pics I shot in Athens. Here are a very few. Of course Trenna is posting 10x as many on FB. (Maybe I should just leave this all to her!!!)
