A Day of Total Travel - and a Day of Ancient Greece

Saturday (10/2) was a blur of multi-modal travel. We left our beloved Paris hotel at 9:15 AM and walked the short distance to the RER to return to CDG airport, but....MON DIEUX! No direct service to CDG on 10/2 and 10/3 due to construction, yikes!  But we survived the detour (and got a bus ride to boot) and made it to the gate with a goodly 45 minutes of waiting time before our 12:35 PM flight to Athens.   Kudos to Air France, they were on time and we even got fed on the plane!  Funny how even mediocre food is a treat now that most U.S.airlines don't even give you peanuts.

The X95 express bus took us to Athens city center through some very uninspired landscapes - think West L.A. - but we arrived at Syntagma Square in about an hour's time and grabbed a taxi for the last few blocks to the hotel.  The Hotel Philipos is a stone's throw from the Acropolis and and new Acropolis Museum - great location and nice spot.

Best of all we did a perfect rendezvous with our friends Bill and Nancy Hull from Santa Barbara, CA, who have been on 2 other European bike adventures with us - the first was in Northern Spain in 2002 followed by Provence in 2007.  They had been up for about 24 hours but rallied enough to join us for dinner.  All in all, from hotel in Paris to hotel in Athens it was about 9 hours of transit.  There goes Saturday!

In deference to our jet-lagged friends we started Sunday morning at 10 AM with a subway ride to the National Museum of Greece - and what luck!  It is the first Sunday of the month so all national facilities are free!  So we spent a lovely morning looking at the amazing antiquities of Mycenae (1600-1100 BC) onwards.  Some of the artifacts dated back to Greek "pre-history", meaning 6800 BC!  Puts your time on earth in perspective to look at a fossilized fig from +/- 6000 BC.

A glimpse at some notable bronzes housed at the National Museum:

149 BC

400 BC



As we are gluttons for museum punishment, and because we feared the new Acropolis Museum might not be open again during our short stay, we decided to tour this amazing facility (http://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/). It houses all the decorative elements of the Parthenon and surrounding temples still found at the Acropolis - not to mention leaving space for the Elgin (Parthenon) Marbles that they have requested be returned by the British, currently housed at the British Museum. It is a fantastic facility with amazing views of the Acropolis itself - here is a close-up of the small "entry temple" from the window of the Acropolis Museum:

 Temple of Athena Nike

Tomorrow (Monday) we will tour the entire Acropolis site, and imagine that will eat up the entirety of the day.  In the evening, our biking tour begins with an introductory meeting and dinner at the hotel, and Tuesday at noon we will leave on a ferry for our first destination of the bike segment - the island of Poros.  Hoping to post again Tuesday night having actually biked!!!