We left Arachova today and drove down to the Peloponnese peninsula, the next stop on our Greek adventure. We took the long route because we wanted to avoid the Athens traffic and since we plan to travel a portion of the shorter route when we head to Athens next week.
We drove along the coast for most of our journey. As noted the other day most of it is undeveloped.
We stopped only once for coffee at a fantastic little bakery.
We crossed the Gulf of Corinth via a very impressive bridge.
Before going to our apartment in Sparta we stopped in Mystras for lunch. According to Rick Steves Mystras is the most important Byzantine site in Greece. It was a cute town but we didn’t explore, we just ate lunch and headed out. Here are a couple of pictures.
We arrived at the apartment and were very confused. The pictures of the apartment’s living room turned out to be a common area shared by guests residing in the associated “town houses.” The apartment itself was very bland and a far cry from impressions we had gotten from the website photos. Rick really didn’t like it and couldn’t imagine living there for four days, so we got online and found an alternate place on booking.com. We called our host and told her that her listing was very misleading. She agreed to give us a full refund (hopefully she does that without a fight). We drove to our new place, a mountain retreat about 850m up on a mountain side. It’s just beautiful. Swimming pools, onsite restaurant serving until 10:30 nightly, breakfast included in a nice dinning room, a 10% discount and a room upgrade to the luxury suite, all for approx. $150 less than the less than desirable accommodations we’d just left. We really lucked out!
Tonight we’ll do a little planning for the next few days and hopefully get a well deserved good nights sleep.