Travel Writer Tigger - Nemea, Argos, .....

As apartments go it passed my hotel inspection criteria, but the WIFI was unreliable (or someone upstairs was using too much of the bandwidth) and our internet connection kept dropping out.  My review of the experience, the people, the places, has therefore had to await our return to chez moi.

Furthermore, I am going to spread it out over a few days so you are going to have to read it like the Pickwick Papers or a Dickens' doing public readings of his novels..... episodically.

Our latest road trip started with me being piled into the back of a little car that I didn't recognize and which had a whiff of smokers and a dog.  I'm not sure where Mr B and F found this one but it came with virtually no fuel in it and the first thing we had to do was find a place to get some go-go juice.  The man who put the fuel into it said that we could pay by card or cat.  F though he said cash because she had seen him pocket a substantial amount of cash off the driver in front, but no, he had said 'CAT'. I was sitting on F's knee at that stage and he reached in the passenger window and scratched my ears.

Fortunately my humans did not trade me for a tank full of fuel in a little car.

Proceeding west toward Korinth, we passed over the canal (I thought we had blogged about it before but a search doesn't bring it up - suffice to say I have seen this piece of engineering from a viewing point on a small bridge over it, and been photographed doing so, and will now make F go and find the photos and put them in a post).  The canal is currently closed because part of if fell on a ship.  The ship was stuck in a place where a collapse had already made it very shallow...

Over the canal we turned south again into mountains and dryness, olive trees and vineyards in valley bottoms and on small plains, and all loomed over by barren hillsides, rocks and the most impressive examples of Roman Cypress we have ever seen.  Someone had earlier told us the Romans brought them (their ancestors) here and clumps of them denote human burial places.

My humans dived the wee car down a side road and we wound around small farms and rocky outcrops, through dusty little villages where pick-up trucks stopped outside cafes, and we eventually pulled into the yard of some small farm that had grapevines all around....  There, an enormous dog started cozying up to Mr B so I didn't beg to go sightseeing.

They were not long anyway; they seemed to know why they were there and quite soon returned with a trolley of boxes that made a glass chinking sound as they loaded them into MY footwells in the back seat.

20 minutes further down the road, past some signs that advised I'd been visiting the Nemea wine district (ahh haaa), and we rolled into a substantial town called Argos.  

Everyone likes to be the "....est" of something.  Argos is reputedly the oldest city of continuous human occupation in the world.  There might be somewhere, some evidence of its ancient origins but they are not immediately on display as you drive through the Argos of today.  Argossians (I made that up) live in modern homes painted in the sorts of colours we would see in Piraeus, with lots more greenery than we enjoy, and attractive town squares.  They are overlooked by one significant hill crowned by what looks like the remains of a Mediaeval Fort.  

Larissa Castle - you can look it up for yourselves.  We contemplated it from below over what my humans described as a very pleasant lunch served in a kafeneion, and one whose proprietor did not mind a sophisticated cat partaking of the ambience along with his humans. 

F & Mr B discussed how much the building in which we lunched looked like it ought to have been a railway station, but there was no evidence that rails had even been anywhere near it.  Some research later and we discovered that it was, or had been, a covered market.  These days it is cafes and restaurants, with their 'outdoor' tables indoors under the vast glass covered central area, and their 'bars' in what had looked to us like waiting rooms arrayed along the sides.