Thursday, July 14, 2011

Escape to the Peloponnese


After two weeks of summer camp, all of the Fellows needed an escape.  So, in the tradition of our initial trip to Hydra waaay back in September, seven of the Fellows (and our token Brit, Tom) loaded into rental cars for a weekend road trip in the Peloponnese.

Just in case you didn't know, the Peloponnese is the large land mass to the west of mainland Greece.  It's almost, but not quite, an island, and it's home to one of my favorite places - the city of Nafplio.  For this trip, however, Greg and Robyn planned for us to head further south towards the town of Kalamata.  The guys were determined to leave Friday night, but the girls opted to sleep and then drive down Saturday morning.  Since we rented two cars, that left all five girls in a moderately-sized car.  It's safe to say that it was a tight squeeze, but we were all so excited to once again be in a car.  

The drive was blog-worthy in and of itself: huge mountains, valleys, and trees; gorgeous beaches and impossibly blue water; endless olive trees and curving mountain roads.  We made our first stop of the day at a roadside stand that looked a lot like it had been abandoned several decades ago.  We were served water and cheese toast by an aging YiaYia.  Just after Whitney compared the scene to something out of the movie Saw, several men in a delapidated pick-up truck pulled into the parking lot and calmly sat down at the lace-covered table next to us to repair their chainsaw.  No joke.


Next, we stopped at the Byzantine-era fortified town of Mystra.  The area that's available to explore is enormous, but we only spent a couple of hours exploring the uppermost region.  It's completely worth a second visit, and I loved taking photographs there.


We tried to catch up with the boys at a beach past Kalamata, but we ended up at different beaches almost next to one another!  Both of the beaches were idyllic, and we stretched out in the soft, soft sand for a nap. Later we watched the sunset at a seaside taverna.


The next day we drove on down the coast and stopped at a completely different beach - the volcanic landscape with its pockets of seawater looked as if it belonged on another planet.  Tragically, my camera's shutter had jammed earlier that morning, so I don't have any of my own pictures of this beach.  After only a few hours (in which I still managed to sunburn), we turned our cars back towards Athens and the last remaining week of summer camp.