In Which I Didn’t Pay Much Attention

Miguel, my driver from the airport, hadn’t heard of my hotel. I looked at the reviews again, slightly worried – there weren’t as many as I remembered, and nothing recent. What had I been thinking? When I was booking this trip I had considered several resorts, but they felt constrained or out of the way. […]

Laying Over

I’ve said it before: there are a lot of moving parts when traveling in a pandemic. Costa Rica shouldn’t have been bad. They don’t require COVID testing for entry, so that was one logistical bar I didn’t have to hurdle (I did pre-trip testing anyway, and that was negative). And they don’t require an international […]

Where the Waters Once Spoke

Delphi! The navel of the world. Spiritual center of Ancient Greece. The Oracle. This is where the ancients looked for wisdom and guidance. This is one of the places the Roman Emperor Julian, from his capital in Constantinople, turned when he attempted to restore paganism to the empire during his brief reign from 361 – […]

I’m Wondering How Ancient Athletes Cheated

Every site has it’s own story and another way it grabs me and invokes my imagination. A friend once described ancient ruins as “old rocks,” but for me they are so much more than that. They are fingerprints and sweat, labor and pride, and they are memory and mirror. Messene, yesterday, was multilayered, like an […]

In Which Greece Goes Beyond

We set out from Napflio driving 2 hours to the southwest, deep into the Peloponnese and rural Greece. The condition of the roads here is extraordinary, with wide open highways, pristine tunnels, and smooth, easy pavement. Even the tiny country roads are well maintained, with rare congestion slowing us down. Our destination was far afield […]

I Won’t Be Buying Honey For a Very Long Time

The sun was just starting to drop in the sky, and the far horizon was barely beginning to turn to pink as we made a quick u-turn on the highway that was taking us back from ancient Mycenae to Nafplio. We had to stop here, at this particular farm stand, because I needed to do […]