Tenth Day of Cruise — Athens/Piraeus
Got up at 7 a.m. this morning, and took a swim in the pool while Nathan started his shower. I swam 10 freestyle laps, 10 breaststroke, and 10 combos of backstroke down and butterfly return. The pool was all my own the whole time.
From there I returned to the room, where everyone was getting showers, then it was on the way to Raffles Court for breakfast. The boat was supposed to dock at 8 a.m., but didn’t get cleared until 8:30, which didn’t delay our 9 a.m. excursion.
The excursion was led by Aphrodite, a short Greek Woman. We got a description of a lot of various things on the way from the port of Piraeus to the Acropolis. Most of them weren’t very helpful. “a beatiful church,” the “elegant” this or that. They were the sort of statements similar to the information that led the Jeopardy competing computer to conclude that everyone was famous, but didn’t really tell you that much.
Along the way we stopped at the original (1896?) Olympic Stadium of the modern era. Would have been nicer if we could have walked among the bleachers, but it was interesting to see, looking through the open end of the stadium.
When we got to the Acropolis, walking up the hill, we saw Mom sitting on a rock about a quarter of the way up the hill. Dad had gone on up, while she had decided that she had gone about as far as she could go.
Our tour led us up to the hill, with a lot of details at several stops along the way. Betsy saw Dad heading down as we were going in through one of the gates, and we saw the Gillespies themselves at the top of the Acropolis right as our tour guide was ending her spiel and giving us an hour to take pictures.
The ruins and the view are impressive, and give you a real impression of the amazing things they were capable of doing. The tour guide had her own slant in favor of the Greeks, just as the Ephesus tour guide had his slant in favor of the Turks. Athens was good, but I like the Ephesus tour better.
Nathan and I both stood on Mars Hill, where Paul addressed the Greeks of Athens. I think I need to go over that passage with him, since he isn’t as familiar as he might be.
From there we hopped the bus back, dropped our stuff off at the room, and dined at Windows for lunch. Both of the kids wanted to dine at Windows instead of doing a pick up meal at Raffles.
The afternoon has been drifting for the kids, writing for Betsy, and bouts of swimming punctuated by reading and writing by me. Betsy, Carly and I also played a round of Pictionary, and I was going to play chess with Nathan, but he couldn’t wait for me to take a brief swim, so maybe we will play chess later.
Dad just walked by, talking about their day. They hired a taxi, which took them to the Acropolis, and a church on a nearby higher hill, the original Olympic stadium, and a restaurant where they had lunch. Sounds like they had a good day, and that the Taxi was a good idea for Mom.
Just an hour until we meet before going to dinner at 6 p.m. at Raffles. We decided to do Raffles for dinner, because we haven’t done dinner there before.
We ended up eating at Raffles with Mom and Dad, who came along and talked about their day.
The show was two instrumentalists who made their own instruments. Quite a good show. The bagpipes without drones was interesting.
At The Rainbow 