Oh the Places I'll Go

  I love to travel.   Perhaps the itch to be on the move is something I was born with (my mother wrote in my baby book that I wanted to go with anyone who was “going bye-bye”), or perhaps it developed through childhood experiences.   My family moved every few years when I was growing up, and Dad always took two-weeks off for an annual family vacation.   We went to national parks, camped in the mountains, or visited relatives who lived across the country (from California to Connecticut).   The most memorable of those family vacations was a road trip from Texas, across the southern states, through the Smoky Mountains, to Washington, D.C., and then on to New York City for the 1964 World’s Fair.   We returned via a more northerly route.   By the time we got back to Texas, we had traveled through at least sixteen states. An even grander adventure was the three month excursion around Europe that I undertook in the fall of 1970.   I was only twenty but...

We have now completed our cruise around the Aegean Sea on the Viking Venus, and I thought I would share some final bits and pieces about the trip. The first stop after leaving Athens was Volos, the sixth largest city in Greece with a population of about 150,000.   Here is a view of the town as we were arriving in port. One of the selling points for Viking cruises is “an included tour in every port.”   Our shore excursion for this day was a bus ride up the winding switchbacks of Mt. Pellos with stops at two of its twenty charming villages:   Portaria and Makrinitsa.    Our visits to these towns were marred only by the fact that Viking sent at least six busloads of passengers on that same included tour so the streets were teaming with tourists from our ship, all wearing Quiet Voxs around our necks with earpieces that allowed us to hear only our particular guide’s narration of the tour. Scott and I managed to find a quiet café where we enjoyed a STRONG Greek co...

 Walking around Thessaloniki, I was struck by the things people and cultures have done to one another in the name of their particular God.  The Macedonians (central Greece) were “pagans” who worshipped numerous gods until Paul and the apostles came to Greece and converted many to Christianity.  The churches here are Orthodox.  (The Christian church centered in Rome became the Catholic branch.) We visited two old churches in Thessaloniki—the more famous Church of St. Demetrios, and the beautiful, small Sophia Church.  Demetrios is the patron saint of Thessaloniki; he was martyred in the fourth century during the crusades.  The first photo shows the Church of St. Demetrios. In an interesting mix of cultures, Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom, is often referred to as the bride of Jesus or the Holy Spirit.  The present church was constructed in the eighth century, on the site of an earlier church destroyed in an earthquake.  This photo shows th...

Perhaps the most memorable impression we have of Athens is of its longevity.   Remembering my long-ago history, philosophy, and literature classes, I recall that Athens is known as the cradle of Western civilization and thought.   This was the home of Aristotle and Socrates and of Homer, author of Iliad and Odyssey .   It is the birthplace of democracy, the original site of the Olympics, and the locale of the stories about the Greek gods Athena, Zeus, and Poseidon, among others.   I have only a very peripheral passing memory of all those stories from Greek mythology. We learned on our tour today that each Greek town has an acropolis, traditionally the highest point in the town where defense fortifications could be built.   Temples were built within those walls as places to worship the Greek gods.   We got a little closer to the Athens Acropolis today but will have to save actually exploring the buildings on the hill until we return at the end of our crui...