April 30- Phaestos There was one more major site to see (though in truth we could have spent a week just on Crete, since we really only got to explore the middle portion of the island in the time we were there). But given our interest in the Minoans, we had to make a trip down to the other of their grand palaces, Phaestos. This was on the south coast of the island, and a little bit west. We took a detour on the way to a site called Gortyna (we didn't know anyt...

April 29 - Knossos What a treat to get up, get breakfast, and head to a site that's ten minutes from our hotel! The important thing to note about Crete is that we are heading backwards into history here—the two major sites on Crete, Knossos and Phaestos—date to the Minoan period, 2000-1350 BC, before the Mycenaeans, and the first major bronze-age culture in Greece. The Minoans are particularly interesting because the available evidence indicates they were...

April 27 - Athens Last day before we fly out to Crete. Bob was still sick (he unfortunately was under the weather for most of the rest of the trip) so we left him behind and headed into Athens. This time we used the Metro and that worked fine too. Apparently the idea of parking at a metro station and taking the train in hasn't caught on here yet - only a few of the stations have lots, this one had a 600-space lot and I think only about 20 were filled. More w...

April 26- Ancient Olympia This was the other of our long-distance road trips—it ended up taking almost four hours to get there, because the mountain roads were even longer and twistier than the ones to Delphi. So it was nearly 1 PM when we got there. We did a pretty quick run through the museum, and then had about an hour to explore the site, which was barely enough time. The main areas of interest were the temples of Zeus and Hera (this is the only site con...

April 25- Mycenae and Nafplio On Wednesday, it was back across to the Peloponnese to pick up where we left off on Sunday. Mycenae is one of the oldest major settlement sites on the mainland: to the extent that the Iliad records history, Agammemon and company would have come from here. The first really important civilization in Greece was the Minoans, who settled mainly in Crete (more on them later). They were largely supplanted by a more warlike kingdom, th...