Second day in Ancient Olympia. Woke up a little stiff after a night sleeping on a bed hard enough to be in any hotel in Mexico City. I wandered down the street from the hotel back to a bakery we had seen yesterday, took back some baked goods and some sodas, and we fortified ourselves to check out the museum for the archeological site and finish out the rest of the site we hadn’t seen yet.
We arrived at the museum thankfully ahead of the tour groups, which meant a quiet and slow tour around the exhibits. It’s all things recovered from the archeological site during its excavation, including portions of the frescoes from the front and back of the Temple of Zeus.
As we wrapped up our visit, the museum started to crowd up with tour groups, so we made a hasty retreat and walked over the grounds back towards the archeological site. We headed to the back of the site where the workshop sat, and realized we hadn’t missed as much as we’d thought. We spent a leisurely stroll through the grounds to check out the last few sites, caught up with a cat by the stadium that absolutely could not care about any sporting events that might have taken place there, and then again made our exit before any further tour groups could overpopulate the site.
We had lunch at a little restaurant right at the edge of the site called Ambrosia Garden, a nice sunny little spot with traditional food, although the menu might have been a little light since it’s off-season. We were near a table of old guys who were holding court with everyone in the restaurant, staff and patrons, having a good laugh and probably a lot of wine. (We didn’t disagree, we also had some good laughs over the half-liter of wine H drank, or at least seven-eighths of it!)
We took a different route back to Patras, this time through the Pelopennese mountains instead of along the coast. We drove through a couple tight towns before spotting a coffee stop called “Nanobros” and turning around after deciding we couldn’t skip coffee from what I assumed were tiny little bros, probably in tiny little track suits, knowing what I know now of Greek fashion. Even thought there was no immediate evidence of bros when I walked in, by the time I got the coffee back to the car, a whole soccer team of local guys in what looked like little league uniforms had loudly made their way onto the front porch, hooting and hollering at passersby. Looked like a good time.
The rest of the drive through the mountains was gorgeous. The sun started setting while we were driving, with the oranges and pinks coating the eastern wall of the valley. A few more little tightly-roaded towns, a few herds of sheep blocking the road, and we crossed the Patras bridge just as it was starting to get dark.
We tried to pick up souvlaki for dinner on our way in through Lefkada, but our normal place was closed, so we picked up some peinirli instead and called it an easy night.
Took a bunch of video over the two days so look for a video — later!