First Olympiad

We woke up to drizzling rain but it thankfully cleared by the time we received Olympia. Breakfast highlights included cheese pies, spinach pies, fresh Nutella filled donuts and halva. Lucky this tour is only a week! The view from the front of the hotel was amazing as well.

We met our entertaining local guide at the Olympia Museum. All original stuff here. Great statues, the one below is of Nike. Under that are 2 relics from the Persian Wars. The helmet was worn by Miltiades, who ran the first Marathon from Athens to Sparta, and back in 490BC.

The group then headed over to the archaeological site of Olympia. It is not known when the first olympics occurred but the first recorded one was in 776BC. It is a large complex that includes temples to Zeus and Hera as well as baths, training areas and statues of victors.

The image below shows the spot where the Olympic flame is lit every 2 years- summer, then Winter Olympics. This only began in 1936 for the Berlin Olympics.

The stadium had up to 45,000 spectators who sat on the grass. The tunnel was covered so that the athletes ran out from the dark passageway.

Most importantly, this is our site guide for today, Zeus.

We had a visit to a local shop where we got to taste pistachio butter and various other things. Lots of souvenirs and fridge magnets. Then we went to this taverna which had well appointed design features inside and out.

A long drive up the coast we drove past the 3rd largest city in Greece, Patras and then crossed from the Peloponnese to the mainland via the Rio-Antirrio bridge, the longest full suspension bridge in the world. The first photo is from the internet.

Not far away we stopped off at another seaside Venetian town, Nafpaktos. The photos speak for themselves. A stunningly beautiful place.

We drove on for over another 90 minutes, up incredibly high mountain roads until we arrived at our destination- Delphi. It was just getting dark when we checked into our hotel. This town is so high up but our views from our balcony are magnificent, so we sat there for an aperitif but it was quite chilly. We went for a wander to find dinner and couldn’t find anything suitable so we went back to our hotel. We got fish and chips in the restaurant and it was surprisingly great. Excellent homemade tartare sauce, big pieces of fresh fish in light batter and rustic crunchy chips.

All of the TV is in Greek except for BBC news which was all about Trump so we hooked up the laptop to the TV and watched some Netflix.

p.s. I spent actual hours in the last few days trying to upload a few photos to finish this post but the poor wifi did not allow it. Finally done!