Day 2, June 1

We jumped six hours via time zone and will land at 9:30am Greece time after 9 hours. Sam has been watching the other passengers, including: Miss Chin, Miss Bud

(Sam) (Both are very pretty)

(Chris) Of the 4 T-weeds, one of these kids was doing his own thing - because the plane followed the 3-4-3 set-up and they gave us a 3 and a 1. So I sat alone for awhile, then Body did. Body watched "First Kid" with Sinbad. Pretty neat that he could watch a movie accompanied by such a famous guy.

(Sam) We are alternating sitting in the solitary seat out of charity. At least 15 young females passed the empty seat beside Chris (8 out of 10 girl passes as I write). Although we were grasping at the last shreds of hope as the last few passengers boarded the plane, a 400 pound woman sat beside (and possible to some extent on) Chris.

(Dave) Day one went a little too quickly for me. One minute we were at JFK, next minute we're in mid-air and it's day 2. Currently we're cruising at a moderate 37,000 feet. We're just over Italy; in an hour, we'll be in Athens. I do hope it will warm up - it's presently -67 degrees F. Sam's picking up Greek from the steward. Greg wants to put a Tower Air pin in the journal... I'm not totally convinced it will fit... signing off... 4512 miles from home

(no turning back now.)

(Greg) 1:00pm - on the road to Ephidarus from Atbens via Corinth. Sam has done a masterful job of navigating thru the city. Chris broke out the cam and went thru the basic introductions. Dave sits in the back seat rocking to the best of Greek radio. The terrain is very scenic, the blue bay on the left and rocky hillside to the right.

(Chris) On the way out of Athens, we stopped at a couple of tourist agencies to find out about flights to Egypt. Looks like it will be too expensive. We also saw a bloody man hit by a car. We saw this deep rocky canal canyon for a brief moment as we passed, and later saw it on several postcards. The scenery improved drastically as we got farther from the city. There was rocky areas with olive trees and very blue Mediterranean

After some very windy (as in turny, not as in blowy) roads, we reached Epidavros. We saw the acoustically perfect theatre (seats 14,000) which dated back 2500 years. You could hear a coin drop (and everyone scrambling to pick it up) from the top row, which we referred to as the Omega section.

(Sam) I must admit the acoustically perfect theatre was very cool. We then saw a bunch of other old stones which were old and made of rock. The only other cool Greek thing we saw was a statue of Californicus complete with shades.

(Chris) We drove the short jaunt from there to Napflion, which would be our home base for the next 2 nights. It is a very pretty town (recommended by Rick Steves) on the sea. there are 2 forts, one high above the city and one on a little island in the bay. Some of the heights were also fortified, and we walked around them for that gorgeous mountains-meet-sea view. As we walked, we checked out food prices at restaurants, hotel prices, (including the Hotel Dioscuri), and the Catholic Church.

Mass was at 6pm and the boys reported their joy at finding a conservative priest who said the Mass with a mix of Greek, Latin, English, French, and several languages of the African bush men and Eskimo and whale cries and there was much rejoicing. I found us a 4 person room for 7000 dracmae per nite (28 bucks), se we paid the gentleman from the commie fund and went out to eat.

There was a nice restaurant in one of the side streets of Naufplion (I'll spell it differently every time because that's what they seem to do here). There were flowers growing over the alley where we sat.

Dave had lamb, Greg and Sam veal (baby-killing barbarians!) and I had chicken. It was an average meal and our waiter was very cool - he kept updating us on the score of the US vs. Greece water polo. We (except Dave) had 2 Amstel beers. Dave warned us that the beers were 50% bigger than US beers and had twice the alcohol, but we had no major results from them, so far...

We walked along the harbor, tried calling Dave's travel agent of Greece pal and noticed the town center - no cars and all marbly tiled floor (I say marbly because it was like swirled marble but much too huge to be actual marble.) We all agreed that the square itself was one of the nicest we had seen - square-wise - but the buildings in it were only mediocre. The floor of it was great...

We hit the hay pretty early in our little low-ceilinged, street-over-looking room. Setting the alarm for 7:30am, we dozed off knowing our first day in Greece had been super-special and still wishing we could pronounce thank you in Greek...