Greetings from the travelers:

We have been back in Indiana for a week and by now have come down to earth after the heady experiences of a fabulous trip to Greece, the Greek Islands, Sicily, the Balearic Islands and Andalusia of Spain, and a night in Dublin. Our cruise was on a wonderful sailing clipper ship, the Star Flyer, to boot. To say this was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life is an understatement. Daphne and I started of in the Plaka area of Athens– the old city in the morning shadow of the Acropolis. Our first night, we walked through the narrow and winding streets paved with marble to a tavern on a high point right beneath the Acropolis.

This dinner in Athens photo was taken there.

The next day we took a tour, visiting many monuments and ruins– (above) The Zeus temple photo shows the Acropolis in the background– which tour ended with our climbing up the inclined path including 192 steps to the top of the Acropolis. Whew! But it was certainly worth it to stand where Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Archimedes may have stood so many years before and viewed the same buildings and city. We came down from the Acropolis and walked through the Agora and then back to our hotel through narrow streets lined with shops, taverns, and restaurants.

I am posting this short BLOG now rather than wait to recount our entire trip. The full story will come later. These few high points will go along with the included photos. I must say I repeatedly had moments of great awe in walking through ruins and even buildings built long before the time of Christ. Then there were the Cathedrals, some started in the first millennium. The beautiful Catedral de Mallorca for example was started in the twelfth century and finished in the seventeenth.
Above photo is of Daphne on deck among all the ropes. On the second day aboard ship we sailed into the caldera of the huge volcanic eruption that destroyed Thira in the fifteenth century BC. We sailed right past the active volcano that now sits in the center of this circular harbor surrounded by islands that form the rim of the ancient caldera. Now called Santorini, the largest island may well be all that remains of the large island that many belive was the location of the legendary Atlantis. Views from the harbor of the steep cliffs and of the sloping island from its high points attest to the force of the volcanic explosion. It probably made Krakatoa look like a minor eruption.

What follows is about Santorini quoted from http://www.santorini.net/:

The wonderful beauty of the Santorini landscape and the deep blue sea filling the central caldera surrounded by red, black, purple, brown, and yellow rocks, speak of one of the largest natural catastrophes to occur during human antiquity in the Mediterranean. A feeling of awesomeness and forbidding remain with us today, some 3.600 years after this landscape was shaped by a tremendous volcanic eruption that devastated an island, reshaping it into the gorgeous scenery we visit now.

Before this huge eruption in the Late Bronze Age (LBA), the island looked very different than what we see today. That caldera and its steep walls existed then, having been created some tens of thousands of years ago by a prior catastrophic eruption. In LBA Minoan times the caldera was almost filled by a huge island that was itself a volcano. The sea surrounded that island as a narrow, shallow, circular waterway. Between this central island and today’s Akrotiri Peninsula a large embayment existed with deeper water to form a wonderful harbour.

On this ancient island, as well as on the modern islands of Thera, Thirasia and Aspronissi, Cycladic culture played a significant role. Their pasturelands, farms, towns, and cities, were on all of these islands. Everything on the central island was destroyed, blown to bits, by the gigantic eruption. On the modern islands, mere remnants of the ancient landscape and fragments of ancient cultural debris lie beneath the thick blanket of tephra deposited during the eruption. Those fragments interest archaeologists whilst the tephra interests volcanologists allowing us to put together a story of a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Imagine four, or more, days of violence and darkness, continuous earthquakes, hot ash flows sweeping across the island, heavy rainfall causing huge debris and mudflows that moved like sandpaper across the island landscape, tephra falling from the sky from the Nile Delta to the Black Sea, numerous tsunamis radiating out across the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, vast rafts of pumice floating all over the region. This was the eruption. A landscape was changed forever. It seems doubtful that the ancients knew that volcanoes, especially this one, could explode with such tremendous violence. To these people, the Cycladians escaping Santorini and the Minoans on Crete, this must have been quite a surprise, the stuff of legends and mythology.

It is a message for today, as well. We must understand that all the benefits that come with volcanism, which we enjoy on Santorini, also come with danger. It is a story that has repeated itself in this volcano throughout geological time resulting in the major effort to monitor and measure this volcano for future eruptions. Today the volcano rebuilds itself with quieter eruptions that are much less-explosive than the Minoan eruption, with activity focused on the island of Nea Kameni. In another 20.000 years the volcano may build back to a geographical form similar to what the ancients knew, and then perhaps explode again.

- End of quote.We visited the beautiful city of Oia (or Ia pronounced eeya) and walked own narrow streets lined with small shops and houses. (photo above of Daphne in Oia) We stopped for a drink in a little tavern clinging to the top of a sheer cliff dotted with homes dug into the rock far above the sea. That deep blue sea harbor was dotted with boats moored in the bay at the bottom of the cliff, photo below. After our trip back to the port city of Fira we took a cable car ride down the cliff to where the tender would pick us up and take us back out to the ship in the harbor.

We visited Yithion and Kataklon on mainland Greece taking a trip to Olympia and saw the original Olympic stadium. After a day at sea we stopped at Taormina on Sicily where Mt Etna smoked nearby. From there we sailed through the famous straights of Messina shortly after sunset and then on to Palermo where Allied troops stormed ashore in the WWII invasion of Italy.

After Palermo we spent two full days at sea on our way to the Balearic Islands where our first port was Palma de Mallorca. During this time I ventured out on the bowsprit of the Star Flyer where the following photos were taken. The one of me on the bowsprit speaks for itself, but doesn’t really convey the thrill of being suspended above the sea some fifty feet in front of the bow of the ship watching the prow breaking the waves. I went back and got the camera from Daphne and took several spectacular photos of the ship from my perch on the bowsprit. The wide angle shot shows the entire ship under sail, the prow splashing through waves. The third ship photo, Daphne on the foredeck, provides another view from the bowsprit. The thrill of sailing on such a ship was overpowering.

Ho rides the bowsprit of the Star Flyer on a bright day in the Mediterranean

The Star Flyer beats through the waves at about eighteen knots - from the bowsprit

Daphne watches cautiously as I take her photo from the bowsprit

We go back aboard the Star Flyer from our mooring in Palma de Mallorca.

After a day in Mallorca (lots of multi million euro yachts) we sailed to Ibiza, the southernmost of the Balearics. We were especially taken by Ibiza where we docked at the port of Eivissa. Together with several friends from the Star Flyer we took a bus and visited the city of Santa Eularia where we walked to the beach and had lunch in a very nice restaurant named "Sinatra’s." After lunch we took another bus to the little town west of Santa Eularia where we walked to the "Hippy Market." I bought an Ibiza T shirt there and took this photo of daphne shopping in the Hippy market.

After Ibiza we sailed to Motril in the Adalusia section of Spain ending our cruise the next day, Saturday, at Malaga just west of Motril. From Malaga we flew to Dublin where we spent an exciting evening among the happy and noisy crowds of young people in downtown Dublin where I took a picture of Daphne beside the statue of Molly Malone.

A long plane ride on Sunday brought us to Chicago where we picked up our car and drove home to Indiana and the lake, exhausted, but very happy with our trip.

A week after our return, Mother Nature treated us to one of the most spectacular sunsets I have ever seen. I know photos never do justice to such scenes, but below is a panoramic composit photo of about 180 degrees taken from our front yard. The colors are not exaggerated.

I plan to flesh this out later with more descriptions and photos, but that may take some time.