Our friend Richard’s parents, Robert and Elaine, moved out to Greece from Marsden in West Yorkshire a few years ago. They designed and built Jasmine Villa, and have a couple of self contained holiday apartments on the first floor.
The villa sits close to the coast in its own olive grove and has beautiful views out over the Gulf of Hydra to the island of the same name.
Sadly, the winter cover had just gone on the swimming pool when we arrived – bad timing on our part!!
Robert and Elaine looked after us very well for a couple of days, feeding us up and showing us around the lovely little holiday town of Ermioni. The town sits on a promontory, the end of which has been left as a park with glorious views out to the nearby islands.
Sorry it’s taken so long to get this post online Robert and Elaine. Thanks again for looking after us, for the olive oil, and for the great tip about Greek butter beans in tomato sauce!! We stocked up before we left the country and have only recently run out!!
Making our way towards Athens we called in at the fantastic Roman theatre at Epidavros. Set in the hillside with views out over the rolling countryside, it’s remarkably intact to say it’s about 1700 years old.
We spent that night on Acrocorinth, the fortified hill above Corinth. The ruins of this fortress are spread over the top of a steep hill behind Ancient Corrinth.
To be perfectly honest we’d got a little tired of looking at rubble, so we peered at the remains of Ancient Corrinth through the fence! But the views from the top of Acrocorinth looking over to the Greek mainland are amazing and put it on our highly recommended list.
The Peloponnese is connected to the Greek mainland by a thin strip of land 6km wide called Isthmia. The idea of cutting a canal through it had first been raised as far back as the 7th century BC, but it wasn’t until 1893 that it was actually achieved and ships no longer had to sail all the way around the Peloponnese.
We stopped to watch a couple of boats pass through the Corrinth canal and then made our way on to Athens, home of the very first European city, the Acropolis.
Despite the greater Athens area being a vast sprawl of apartment and office blocks, the historic centre is now really easy to get around on foot. This is largely thanks to the 2004 Olympic Games which saw a number of new pedestrianised areas introduced. The road that loops around the Acropolis is now particularly good, and stunning at night when all the sights are lit up.
So where did we stay while in Athens? Well, we had one very expensive night at the city’s campsite, run by a rather grumpy woman who complained that we were only staying one night! But we then found a great place to wild camp, just 10 minutes away from the Acropolis by foot. It wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea and it wasn’t exactly level, but we managed and it saved us a small fortune in campsite and public transport costs.
We had a great few days in Athens and felt really pleased to have driven all the way there. We set off to leave but got a little bit lost and ended up driving right through the city centre with Bananarama’s Venus blaring from the stereo! Putting our entire music collection on our iPod makes the shuffle function a little like Russian roulette!
And so began our journey home for Christmas. We just had a few thousand kilometres, 6 countries and 6 weeks to go!
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