Helen of Troy

 JW got up before me, its an over reaction to yesterday, but we did leave the hotel an hour earlier.  The girl at the hotel coffee shop said her name was Helen, and I said Helen of Troy?  She laughed inside a little, I could tell.

We hopped in the car and took off in the direction of Turkey, though we would not quite be making it that far.  After both of our phones went dead doing GPS yesterday, we tried the old college approach of just reading highway signs, which worked out pretty damn good today.

The first stop was Philippi, a city founded by Phillip of Macedonia and later taken over by the Romans, home to a huge battle between opposing Roman forces after the death of Julia Cesar.  The settlement spreads out below a solid rock mountain, and most of the digging out has revealed a city of enormous size.  At one point I asked the girl working the site why this one was so well preserved, and she said it was all buried beneath 20 ft of earth until1986.  Apparently getting a UNESCO designation helps quite a bit as well.  The site of Pella was twice the size of Phillipi, but covered in 4 ft high grass and you just couldn’t see anything.

after Philippi we headed north towards a small town called Drama, oddly enough, and then further west to a cave near the Agrissi river..  I should have known a cave boasting the largest river cave in Greece would have some flooding issues in May, and I was correct.  1/3 of the cave was closed, but it was only 5 bucks and we went for it.  Being the only 2 English speakers in the group, we got special treatment.  It was kinda night.

After the cave we were very much out in no-mans-land, very near the Bulgarian boarder in fact, and quite far from the starting point of Thessaloniki.  I had wanted to go to Halkidiki next, and we laid a course, unfortunately, the wrong course.  An hour later we still weren’t there and hadn’t eaten lunch yet.  Though the road we took was pretty amazing, going from lush Missouri forest road to a flat Kansas farmland road, followed immediately by a Colorado mountain road and then right back into a Cretan olive tree road.  We even saw a stone lion out in the middle of nowhere, but we didnt bother looking it up to see what the deal was.

We finally arrived at the eastern most finger of halkidiki and drove down the beach to walk a bit, but by now it was way too late to eater dinner, so we got some gas and headed by to town.  After cleaning up a bit, we had dinner again at Fou Tou Mezze, walked around a bit, and then headed back to the room preparing for our trip to Lesvos tomorrow.