The Launder's big adventure

Patras
Monday 23rd April

We met another British couple, Keith and Janet, and swapped stories and advice over some lovely red wine. The following day we took a drive to ancient Olympia. Max really enjoyed the role play here where we showed him the place for practicing the javelin, discus and running. We also showed the boys the place where wrestling, boxing, long jump and high jump was practised and to help them visualise we got them to do some of it themselves. This was fine until we did the long jump, where upon we were asked to stop as we might mess up the grass! Bearing in mind it was perfectly ok to walk on the grass and that it was obvious a tractor was used to cut the grass we did feel this was little more than kill joy and so quashed the physical teaching of history. However, Max and Jon were able to run in the stadium where the traditional running race was held. Max really enjoyed this site and lapped up all the information and we were able to tell him a little of the history to the Olympic games.

Corinth Canal

We drove over the Corinth canal on our way to the campsite and blinking we missed it!
So the following day we drove back and walked along the bridge to marvel at the engineering feat. We came, we saw and we moved on to Patras.

Cyprus

Monday 9th April

It was great to see some familiar faces and the boys were especially pleased to see their Granny. Jon and I managed to have a day off, the first time in 6 months! It didn’t feel at all weird being back in a roomy house and it was especially great that I didn’t have to cook every night and Jon was more than pleased at not having to do the washing up. Jon managed to get a couple of massages and I was able to have my hair done. Such luxuries! Having been to Cyprus previously we didn’t have an overwhelming urge to explore the island and go zooming off here and there so we mainly stayed in the Paphos area.
The boys were happy to have attention from somebody else for a change and enjoyed having their nails painted and watching many, many videos.

On our first day there we took a stroll around my mum’s Villa situated up in the hills overlooking the Troodos mountains and away from all the development that is currently taking place in Cyprus. On showing Mum Max’s warts (you remember the episode in Italy?) we proceeded to put on the milk from a plant called Spurge. The following day Max told me his arm was hurting and when we looked under his arm it was very red and swollen and so was the inside of his elbow. Max spent the day with his arm held against his chest but complained little. When we looked at his arm the next day he had great big blisters, so we lanced them and aired them to try and dry the skin.

The following day we decided to take him to hospital. The doctor said Max had had an allergic reaction to this natural medicine and needed his wounds cleaning daily. He wrote a list of 7 items on prescription for us, we asked many questions about what should be applied when and how many times and he tried as best he could to explain. In the end, he took us for the imbeciles we were and took us to a nurse to demonstrate. So another episode of Max screaming in a hospital room as the nurse sympathetically but necessarily roughly cleaned Max’s sores and lavished cream on them.

We visited Aphrodite’s baths near Lacchi and enjoyed a walk along the cliffs edge there. Max walking with his arm stuck in the air so as to help the healing process! The boys were still resplendent in their bunny ears.

We took a trip to Limmasol, whilst Jon conducted some business I was able to take the boys to a park opposite the sea front where there were oodles of play equipment for them to play on. In the park we discovered a zoo providing good entertainment and costing less than £3 for the whole family to get in.

Mum and Danny accompanied us to George’s snake park. George is an Austrian who has lived in Cyprus for many years and is a snake fanatic. He has been battling for many years to change the Cypriots view of snakes, they think the only good snake is a dead one. There are 8 species of snake on Cyprus 3 of which are venomous and only one of these deadly, the blunt nosed Viper. However, the Cypriots kill a snake as soon as look at one. George gave us an emotive, if slightly boring for the children, talk on his campaign for the snakes in Cyprus. The boys were able to touch a Montpelier snake (one of the venomous ones!).

We took a trip to the bird and animal park at Coral Bay. This was a shocking £28 for the family and was basically full of exotic and wonderful birds. It also had lots of goats, deer, camels, giant tortoise, Ostriches, a Giraffe, monkeys, a red fox and many snakes. The surroundings were nice but the cages were quite small and the larger animals showed signs of distress.

Saturday 21st April

We returned to Marathonas to find that some bored child had wiled away the hours by throwing stones at the caravan leaving some impressive dents along the way. The following day we said a fond farewell to Mavis and left taking our pock marked caravan with us.

Marathonas

Monday 2nd April

The campsite in Athens was nice but the yellow rain, honestly it was really yellow and left yellow tide marks on all it touched, the battle of Britain and the hounds of the Baskervilles in the morning, not to mention that blooming Scops Owl, which seems to be following us, we were quite glad to leave it and head to Marathonas. A family from Germany chanced upon the place an hour or so later and pulled in to stay in a tent with their 3 children 13, 10 and 8. We spent the afternoon chatting to the mum Lisa who is an American and didn’t see the boys all afternoon, they were so pleased and excited to play with other children who could speak English that it was quite difficult to convince them to go to bed. 2 days later the German/American family moved on and all of our boys wanted to go with them and didn’t mind leaving their parents behind!

We had lazy days on the beach whilst Jon worked and organised the trip to Cyprus to see my mum. During this time a stray dog that lived around the campsite recognised us as a soft touch and adopted us. Jon decided to call her Mavis. She guarded our caravan with great tenacity and woe betides any magpie that strayed too close. She had a very calm and pleasant manner and would walk any member of the family to the toilet block, wait for them, and then return leading the way. She won us over and it wasn’t long before we were off to the supermarket to buy dog food, a bowl and biscuits! If circumstances had been different we would have adopted her and taken her with us, but alas it was not to be.

Sunday 8th April

Easter Sunday. To help the boys celebrate Easter we had a mini Easter egg hunt and Jon got creative and made some bunny rabbit ears out of cereal boxes these were then stuck to their sun hats! Over the weekend the campsite started to fill up with Greeks. One family invited us to join them for a traditional Greek Easter fare. The boys enjoyed seeing a lamb roasted on the spit, the decorated eggs and especially the abundance of chocolate and sweets. The family was very friendly and hospitable and didn’t mind that we couldn’t bring anything to add to the feast.

April ’07 – Greece, Athens

Sunday 1st April

Being a sufficiently long time since we braved a museum we thought we would try again with the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Jon’s luck is a valuable commodity as admission is free due to it being the first Sunday of the month! We had already planned our strategy in basically letting the children decide what we looked at and where we went and this worked great. The boys behaved really well and wanted to know lots of information about things, well swords, daggers and spears mainly oh and the two skeletons were equally satisfying!
The boys behaved really well but unfortunately, as is common in these places, the staff were over zealous in their protection of the glass surrounding the displays. Being children when they pointed to something they touched the glass but only with one finger and they definitely did not bang and we had numerous people coming up to tell us not to touch the glass, bearing in mind that after two minutes the boys had forgotten that they weren’t supposed to be touching it! This spoiled it for the boys as they were fascinated with many things but we had to keep telling them not to touch the glass that they lost enthusiasm.

Iti National Park

We drove to Iti national park fully expecting to go for a walk in the mountain range. Initially we went a bit wrong whilst in the town of Lamia and ended up going the wrong way. In order to recover this problem we ended up in a small village and followed the convenient signs for the place we wanted, however we ended up on a road that looked for all intents and purposes like a dried river bed. Thinking this could not be right we asked another driver who said, in Greek, that it was definitely the way to go. So we followed the road a bit further and indeed there were more signs showing it was in fact a road and not a watercourse. Following the hand signals of the Greek, because lets face it I don’t understand a word of Greek and he didn’t speak any English, we found the mountain road.
A short way up the wind road we came across a pretty waterfall bringing icy water down from the mountain, definitely worthy of a few photos. Further up again we came across a sight one would not normally expect to see on the side of a mountain; a fighter jet parked up on some concrete blocks! Someone had thoughtfully placed a rickety chair next to a wing so we could climb all over it. It was a jet designed for an aircraft carrier so it had a hook for catching the arresting wires in the landing area. We continued on up the road and drove through a few single-track villages, in one village we were met by 4 horses in the middle of the road that grudgingly moved out of our way.
We were probably expecting too much, hoping for a welcome to Iti national park sign or some other indication that we had reached our destination but after a further hour of driving on small windy roads we gave up the walking idea and decided to get back down the mountain. This sounded quite easy! However we ended up on a barely single unmade track, thankful once again for having a 4x4. We steered around fallen trees, rocks and potholes and traversed small streams flowing over the road. There were a couple of moments when a large rock had to be traversed where Jon was leaning out the passenger window stating “Yes plenty of room, there is at least 2 inches to the edge!’ I’m not entirely convinced he was joking. Max is made with a nervous disposition and was fretting away, enough for the whole family and stated numerous times that “Daddy should be driving”. Huh such a vote of confidence. Cadan and Jory were enjoying the whole thing although Cadan did feel the need to tell me on one occasion, “We are too close to the edge Mummy!” I couldn’t help but agree with him! Once past the worst of the track we met a long horned cow coming the other way, we skirted each other nicely and carried on our way both confused about what we had just seen. We eventually made it back down the mountain where we were rewarded with a White Stork on top of a telegraph pole and a Goshawk (we think) on a tree. We were a little disappointed we had not managed a walk but regaled each other with our adventures for the drive home.

The following day after such great adventures we decided to enjoy the thermal springs at Thermopylae. The water was just like stepping into a bath, although slightly too hot for the boys, they were very pink when they got out! Max took the longest to get in the water but when it was time to go he didn’t want to get out. We were all pink faced and thought it was great, the boys stating they definitely want to go back.

1.2 Athens

Thursday 29th March

We took off for Athens and stayed in a campsite on the outskirts. Friday we ventured into Athens taking the bus and then the metro which was the height of excitement for the boys. We had to change trains and so took the opportunity to have lunch, we found a very small patch of green where we undertook to eat our picnic much to the amusement of most passers-by. Near the end of our meal we were regaled by a zealot stating this little bit of green was not for public use and belonged to the ministry of agriculture, or something like that! Whilst packing away our things and rounding up the children, who typically then decided to trample through the flower beds, this man kept going on. In the end Jon told him the international words for go away and he reluctantly took the hint. On exiting the green we came across a policeman who had been standing close by but hadn’t felt the need to turf us off!
After this we made our way to the Acropolis and climbed the steep incline to reach the Panthenon at the top. The Acropolis is going through major reconstruction and so the view is spoiled slightly by the scaffolding and machinery. However they have left ½ of the building unspoiled and it is really a true marvel, especially when you consider the little engineering tricks they used to overcome the problem of perspective when creating a completely symmetrical building. Of course getting the children to understand what 2,500 years old means is next to impossible. I knew I was failing when Cadan asked “how old was I mummy?” Far more interesting to the boys was the fact that some of the stones were very slippery and the dog fast asleep on his back with his paws in the air attracting just as many photos as the Panthenon itself. The view of Athens from the top is spectacular with buildings stretching away into the distant hills.

We were about to go into the museum at the top but they were closing, shortly after we were also ushered off the Acropolis as it was closing time. We felt that we were just getting into the old building and architecture thing too! Unfortunately in our removal from the real world we had not realised that the clocks had gone forward one hour so had arrived at the Acropolis near to closing time, although the ticket people didn’t feel a need to point this out!

Thermopylae

The main reason for stopping in Stylida was it’s proximity to Thermopylae. After reading the book “Gates of Fire” by Steven Pressfield regarding a famous battle fought here between 10,000 Greeks against 1,700,000 Persians. The Greeks held them off with fierce fighting for 2 or 3 days but the treacherous Greek Euphalatis guided the invading army along a mountain path to attack from the rear. Before this occurred most of the Greek army had retreated leaving 1000 Greeks to defend the narrow pass (including 300 Spartans) the Greeks still managed a great fight but all died in the end. The narrow mountain pass is no longer there, as the coastline has moved out by approx 1 km but there is a monument showing where the original coastline would have been. The Greeks managed to hold the invading army off for long enough that the rest of Greece was able to prepare for battle and eventually defeat the Persians.

After this we drove to the thermal spring close by and took a gentle stroll along the steaming river.

Looking for some more attractive thermal springs we ventured further along the gulf to kamenavourla. We picnicked on a grassy beach and then went for a stroll along the seafront; thermal springs forgotten. We walked for a good couple of hours and the boys enjoyed watching the fishermen sitting on the beach.