Ancient Greece with friends!

The best days of all are the ones we spend with friends!

Today we woke up early and hurried out the door.  Very unlike us for this vacation. But we had a good reason!  Today we had a date with our friends from Colorado.  The kids were bouncing off the walls, and I am pretty sure they didn't stop talking the entire time.  Christine, Amy, and Michael all worked together at Peabody for a while and we love them. Amy was both Luke and Isa's speech pathologist before she moved to a different school and we've spent lots of time with Christine both at school and out at the barn while the kids ride her horse, Taco.

The most beautiful faces we saw in Greece today!

Side view of the Parthenon

I think we were so accustomed to ruins at this point the kids barely noticed the Parthenon!  Sad, but true!  The scaffolding and the crane took away from the ancient effect, but things have to be maintained.

It is a magnificent building.

After a long hot hike through the

Acropolis, the Theatre of Dionysus, 

the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and an Athens market, 

we grabbed some gelato on our way to lunch.  

Because that is how we do things in our family.

Christine and Amy had a restaurant that they really wanted to go back to, so we trudged around Athens until we found it.  It was delicious, and we were all so full!  I have fallen in love with Greek food.  I must figure out how to cook some of it.

We were so thrilled to have a day with our friends, seeing them made us so happy.  They were our last link to Colorado for the year, and leaving them made my heart feel heavy.

We have had such a wonderful trip.  We have experienced so many different things, seen new places, marvelled over the beauty of the earth and sea, and eaten new and creative dishes.  I am so thankful that we were able to take the kids on this adventure and that life cooperated so that we could do it.

Tomorrow we will head to the airport to fly home via Norway.  We have a very long day ahead of us - Michael figured out that we have 12 hours of flying tomorrow and 3 or 4 of layover time.  When you add in the hours we are there before the flight tomorrow and time we expect to take to get through customs, we by the time we get to JFK we will have been travelling for the better part of a day.