Sunday April 9th, 2006, we all met up in Athens, eager to get started on the first Rick Steves' tour of Greece for the year. That's our route, on the map on the right (his map, not mine).
Who were we? Our guide was David. That's David as in David Willett, who literally wrote the book, the Lonely Planet book, on the Peloponnese, where we were headed. Hard to do better than that. David turned out to be an ex-Brit, turned Aussie, with a nicely sardonic take on Greek history. He tried to convince me that the Spartans were the real democrats, not the Athenians, and made a pretty good case. That's David over on the right, ready for a wine and olive oil tasting in Kardamyli.
The guy driving the big purple bus was Spiros - quiet, charming, and very, very good at his job. I'd already discovered, riding KTEL buses around Northern Greece, that Greek bus drivers didn't deserve their bad reputation. The KTEL drivers own their buses, and make quite sure neither they nor their passengers mess them up. Don't think about putting your feet up on their seats! Get up early enough in the morning, and you could catch Spiros washing his bus.
The group was made up of couples and singles from all over the U.S., and one couple from Canada. You'll meet some of them in the following pages, meanwhile, the photo below shows the tired but triumphant subset who made it up to the top of Monemvasia. And me? I'm currently single, 58 at the time of the tour. A few years back, I decided 30 years as a software engineer was long enough, and took "early" retirement from IBM. Since then, I've done a fair amount of travel, mostly in Asia, and mostly solo.
The first time I planned to visit mainland Greece was back in 1999, as an add-on to a Rick Steves' tour of Turkey. We would fly to Athens, and rent a car to tour the Peloponnese. Then I fell down some steps in Istanbul, and wound up hopping around on crutches with my right ankle in plaster. Since I was the designated driver for Greece, we had to cancel that part of the trip.
I didn't forget about Greece, but it was 2005 before I was ready to try again. I planned a six week trip across Europe, with the Rick Steves' tour at the end. This time, after thoroughly enjoying London, Annecy and Montreux, I managed to fall and break my left wrist in Murren. Two wonderful British couples rushed to my rescue, and the doctors at the Interlaken hospital pinned the bone back together for me, but I couldn't continue to travel alone. My medivac insurance got me home, and the Europe Through the Back Door insurance refunded the tour cost.
I thought that perhaps I was not supposed to visit Greece? Or perhaps a third time would be the charm? All that history and all that scenery still beckoned. Not to mention the retsina. After the more painful months of physical therapy were behind me, I started planning again. But this time I would START in Greece.
I took all the photos on this trip using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5. It's my fourth digital camera - I started with a Canon G1 that I loved, but the battery charger weighed a ton and the zoom was pretty feeble. I took a Minolta DiMage A1 round the world, but that camera was too heavy, and too fragile for the trip. Bits fell off... My second Canon was hopeless - I couldn't see anything in the view finder in bright light. But the Panasonic worked well, especially the 12x zoom. I've done some minimal photoshopping on some of these pix, mostly to get the horizon horizontal, and to crop a little here and there.
You'll find more photos from this trip over at kwilhelm.smugmug.com. Clicking on most of the photos here will take you to a smugmug page with a large version. A new window will open for the first click, other photos will show up in that same window.
Enough talk! Let's travel.
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