Olympia, Greece

Yesterday we awoke in the awesome Hotel Pelops - a great family owned hotel in Olympia.  We had another great breakfast and off to see the history.

Olympia is basically a tourist town.  It has hotels, stores, museums, and a site.  It is nice to see the difference between cities.  Anyway, so we started our day off with the site.  The weather was in our favor again so it was beautiful.  So the Sanctuary of Olympia is a large, interactive site.  You can actually walk around to see all of the different buildings that were there.  So we took a nice morning walk through the sanctuary.

 We saw the Temple of Zeus which housed the Zeus sculpture (one of the seven ancient wonders of the world).  It is hard to imagine the size that this building was in antiquity.  It has fallen down and some of the column drums are amazing in size.  The one photo is Tyler standing next to the capital of the column (in the erected column, it is the top square piece) It must have been one amazing building.

Then we went over to the ancient stadium.

I remember liking the Phillipeion before because it is a circle.  It was built by Phillip the second who was Alexander the Great's father.

Then we went to the Archeological Museum of Olympia to check out the artifacts there.  It is an impressive museum and I like the design.  It has rooms that divide the artifacts around the center room which displays the pediment sculptures from the Temple of Zeus.

We went right over to the Museum of the Olympic Games in Antiquity.  Which had some interesting things to look at but mostly had a lot of information about the Olympic Games.  This was all much more appealing to me now than it was 2 years ago so I am glad to have come back.

After we finished everything we had some lunch and were on our way back to Athens.  It was about a 4 hour drive again through some amazing scenery.  Since I was driving, I stopped to take some pictures this time :-)

So we thought we'd make a list for us to remember some bullet points about driving in Greece since it is all over now:

• Any other time the Greeks just relax and don't really rush except when they are driving.  We were passed constantly.  Not even like in a passing zone (which they do have).  Going uphill on a mountain, around a turn.  One time we got passed by a car that was getting passed himself.  It was ridiculous.
• On the highways we have rest stops and Wawas.  Well, they put porta-potties up on the side of the rode to use.  Which I did.  Very interesting.
• Like in PA we have deer on the side of the road - well the Greeks have dead dogs on the side of the road.  Very, very sad.  And also just constantly worrying about them being the roads when driving through towns.
• Greek tolls are expensive.  We knew that we were going to run into tolls but there was a lot of tolls for the short distance we drove and they were expensive.  The average being around 2 euro.

We found the car rental place, returned the car, and got some food.  It was an exciting adventure but I'm glad to be back in Athens with plenty of time left to see the sites here, shop, relax and enjoy Greece.