The Classics

March 4-7: The longest leg of our trip included: a 4 hr train from Rome to the shore in Ancona, 10 minute bus to the port, 22 hr ferry (5pm-3pm the next day), and then a 4 hr train ride to Athens and finally a 15 minute walk to our hostel (we named our heavy orange backpacks Fred and George after the Weasly twins in Harry Potter, in hopes of making their 40-lbs seem more funny than painful).

An interesting thing about Greece is they use a different alphabet than us, and the transcriptions into our alphabet have no consistent spellings, so the road names on our GPS map were quite different than those in our guidebook, which were in turn different from the actual names written on the road signs. That problem only came up later, though, because when we first got to Athens around 9pm, tired from that all night boat ride with no bed, (in our 36th straight hour of travel time since we left Rome), the signs were ONLY written in the Greek alphabet, and our GPS device ran out of battery power. Exercizing great inginuity, along with some pretty sweet guesswork, however, we found our little negative 5-star hostel and collapsed into a very firm bed. Victory!!!!


In front of the temple of a greek god whose name starts with an H...forget the whole name right now! 2. At the 2500 year old cemetary of Kerameikos, we counted 15 turtles! How many do you see in this picture??


1. On top of a big rock with the ancient acropolis behind us. 2. Jeff in the Kerameikos cemetary... peek-a-boo!


1. Us in front of the Parthenon... we were a tad sad to see all that scaffolding in the way of truly great pictures, but history must be preserved some way, I guess! 2. These are some daisies behind the Acropolis-nice artistic picture!