Tag Archives: family vacation

When in Greece, climb something

I’m not much of a traveler. Taking our family to Greece for 2.5 weeks was a big step for us, though my wife was the driving force behind the adventure.

I learned some things in Greece, most of them not very useful in my everyday life at home, but a few of them mildly interesting. Following are some observations made in Greece (your experience may differ.)

Greece is hot. Greece is exceedingly hot in summer. They told me this was an unusually hot summer, but seeing all the habits Greeks have developed over the centuries to avoid the summer heat, I’m thinking Greek summers are always going to be hotter than I can stand. Also, air conditioning is marginally effective when all the doors and windows are thrown wide open.

There are lots of hills in Greece. You can’t fail to notice this when you are walking in 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. Just about everything you want to see is on top of a big hill.

There are lots of neat things to see in Greece, amazing, ingenious, beautiful things. If you survive the walk up the hill, you can see them.

The fruits of surviving the walk.

Ounce for ounce, bottled water is the best beverage investment you can make in Greece. It is inexpensive, which is good, because you will need gallons of it. Beer can be purchased anywhere, from a vending machine in the laundry mat to a kiosk on the beach. I found this form of liberty refreshing. What I found less refreshing was the beer. There are many varieties, from Greece and elsewhere in Europe. Almost universally, I found them to be the continental cousins of Bud Light. If you love Bud Light, you’ll find many beers to like in Greece. Otherwise, bottled water.

The kids could not find any lemonade that wasn’t carbonated (as the locals said, “with gas.”)

Athens is noisy. Traffic is a never-ending game of chicken: the one traffic cop I saw was smoking a cigarette; it would have seemed more humane if they had also offered him a blindfold. There are lots of stray cats. The pigeons don’t give the cats a second thought. Greek bus drivers have nerves of steel.

Island villages are more peaceful, but drivers will still park in the middle of the street to run to the ATM.

Beach can mean a place with sand, or a concrete deck with ladders down into the water.

Greek landscape is beautiful. Greek people are friendly.

I can’t tell if Greeks are whispering sweet nothings or screaming bloody murder at each other. The hand gestures and voice volumes look and sound exactly the same to me. Maybe that’s how they keep Americans from knowing their business.

Travel tip: You can avoid the hill climb by visiting the LEGO version in the museum.

What happens in Tennessee stays in the photo available in the gift shop at the end of the tour

Time flies when you’re not blogging. Last I checked, it was Christmastime, and now spring break has come and gone.

For spring break we piled into the minivan and headed south. We’d heard rumors of warmer weather and interesting attractions in Tennessee, and since it was within our spur-of-the-moment traveling range, why not?

Well, traffic for one thing. Every school district north of Kentucky had spring break the same week. I’ve never been in so many traffic jams in open country. I felt sorry for the families continuing to Florida during this temporary Midwestern diaspora.

Knoxville was a trip down a 30-year-old memory lane to the one semester I spent at the University of Tennessee before I became a graduate school dropout. UT does not seem to have suffered from our breakup. It remembered less of me than I did of it.

In Chattanooga, we played all over Lookout Mountain, taking the Incline Railway trolley up and down, then crisscrossing the mountain by car. We strayed momentarily into Georgia. Buster and Big Man had never been to Georgia, and since they didn’t leave the car, we debated if it counted. They never actually set foot there, but they did break the plane of Georgia, which counts in football. Since Georgia is a big football state, we’re counting it.

Incline Railway Lower Platform
Incline Railway Upper Platform
Inside the trolley car.
Chattanooga Aquarium viewed from the Tennessee River.
Ruby Falls underground waterfall.
Colored lighting is not a natural feature of the cave.

Pigeon Forge is an Appalachian Vegas, if you replace the casinos with moonshine and go-carts. We arrived with three intentions: Dollywood, Alpine Slide, and Titanic Museum (why there is an ocean disaster museum in the Smokey Mountains I’ll let you ponder). We did none of them. We got too distracted by other things, and the Alpine Slide was closed by high winds and a forest fire.

Still, we had fun discovering other adventures. We even spent hours visiting a bird sanctuary, which, Alfred Hitchcock notwithstanding, was not as horrible as it sounds. The boys loved it.

The kids decided they wanted to move to Tennessee. My wife was almost on board with them, but she didn’t see enough Target stores; when she drives too far without seeing Target, she starts to hear dueling banjos in her head. From there it’s a short mental leap to a Deliverance/The Hills Have Eyes situation.

It was not all fun and games. The minivan got progressively louder in the water pump area as the days passed. I grew apprehensive about the 500-mile trip home. During the drive back, I kept one eye on the road and one eye on the temperature gauge. She didn’t sound healthy, but our sick car soldiered through, delivering us safely, despite her nasty cough.

Now, $800 later, she’s sounds good as new, almost. Add that to the cost of vacation. It kind of makes me wish we didn’t buy a family photo at every ride and sideshow we visited. Oh well, those family photos will be a minute of pleasure when we stumble across them in basement shoe boxes every 15 years or so. So I guess that’s worth it.