Friday, May 29, 2015
Today we woke up in our cozy little hotel in Olympia to start out adventures.
Our first stop was the Museum of the History of the Olympic Games in Antiquity. At this point we have seen A LOT of museums and have been to a lot of archeological sites. So I am sure we missed something very important in this museum but it seemed that most of the really great stuff is housed in the Archeological Museum. Under the very watchful eye of the docents we quickly made our way through here.
We then stopped by the free Archimedes Museum. It has a fancier name but basically it was a small museum that highlighted Archimedes inventions. The boys could give a much better explanation of every single exhibit we saw. However, the takeaway for me was that he was a really smart guy way ahead of his time. Our super duper helpful docent, Mario, thoroughly and enthusiastically explained every single exhibit. We spent a lot of time here and were the only visitors. If you ever go to Olympia, stop by here and ask for Mario!
We will see the real thing in Athens but this is a reproduction of the first laptop. See the little bitten apple on the side? ;) It does something fancy like predict eclipses and other things but the main point is that you give input, it does calculations and then produces output. It was found on the bottom of the ocean in perfect condition.
Another Archimedes invention with a fancy name that I don't remember. It was used for moving really heavy blocks of stone with just one finger.
This was Archimedes' solution for figuring out if objects were made of pure gold. A solid gold ingot is on the right. An object is balanced on the left. When submerged in water, you can tell if the object is pure gold or if the seller/artisan is trying to pull one over on you.
That concluded our time in Olympia and we headed toward Nafplio (it has about a million different spellings). Unfortunately (for me, Everlie) we took the route through the mountains. You can see a few of the roads on the previous post. Mostly they were glorified goat trails through the mountains. There are not a lot of photos of this adventure as I spent most of the time with my head in a motion sickness bag that I brought with us from the airplane (I learned that from previous experience). Dramamine became my best friend!
I did manage this photo while we were down in the valley.
The boys were finally kind enough to stop for me to walk around the square of a little village. Luckily, there was a nearby path that lead us to the river. We took a break for the boys to skip stones. They are expert rock-skippers!
After that little break at the river, they went in to get us some lunch at the Super Market. They came out with a variety of snacks and reported there was not a single fresh item in the market. We enjoyed testing a number of Greek snack foods.
Davis chose a chocolate egg for his lunch! There was a plastic egg inside with a little toy car as a prize.
My drugs kicked in so I slept and missed the rest of the trip. Below you will see the old city of Nafplio. All of the old Greek cities are really hard to navigate. Thankfully this hotelier suggested parking above and walking down to our hotel.
We were surprised at our modern and luxurious accommodations in this ancient city. The area we are in is built into the side of a hill and the rocks make up a part of the rooms.
On our way to dinner, we saw numerous orange trees full of fruit. There are many orange groves in the area and we have enjoyed delicious fresh squeezed orange juice.
I don't know exactly what this salad contained but our hotelier suggested that we order the specials at the recommended restaurant and that is what we did. It was delicious!
We ended the day with a sunset walk along the Argolic Gulf with the Bourtzi Fortress in the back ground.
One bonus picture from today. We are glad that many signs have English translations. Unfortunately, they don't always get the translation exactly right!
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