If you have met me for 5 minutes during an even-numbered year, you know that I am a honey-roasted nutbar about the Olympics.

Our dear boat tootled around to the Peloponnese, to the town of Katakolon, which is about as big as my foot but has a deeply dredged harbor because it’s only about a 40-minute bus ride to Olympia.

Our tour guide was Emilia: little, fast-moving, impossibly chic. Not the world’s biggest fan of repeated bathroom breaks. She was great.

Our bus driver seemed to feel that the line down the middle of the road was a running guide, not a lane demarcation, and that the speed limit was half the actual recommended speed. I kept seeing tiny houses by the side of the road, like spirit houses, with icons and candles in them. Emilia said they were to mark the location of wrecks.

There was a spirit house about every 20 feet.

We passed the town of Pyrgos and drove through a bunch of tomato farms and vineyards. We saw a shepherd with a crook guiding a bunch of sheep around. (Why yes, I did get slightly excited.) We saw Romany children begging at a stoplight. The bus driver stuck his head out the window and yelled at them.

We wore headsets during our tour of Olympia, and I know Emilia told us lots of interesting information, but most of what I heard was a loud major-key chord of angel choirs echoing in my head the whole time.

Would you like to see some piles of rocks? Yes you would.

How about a column?

That’s a reconstructed column from the temple of Zeus. It is ginormous.

Temple of Hera, anyone?

Many of the stones, being limestone from an ancient sea, are filled with shells.

At one point we were standing under a magnificent tree, drunk on the sweet scent of it, with tiny white flower falling into our hair and down the necks of our shirts. It was heavenly. I asked Emilia what kind of tree it was. “Well it’s an olive tree, of course!”

My sister even took a picture of me under that tree, looking as if  I need to stand up straight.

Then we left the nice shady bits (FILLED with tourists and Greek schoolchildren) and went to the stadium. If it hadn’t been so hot, I’d have run a little, but you’ll have to make do with this:

You kind of have to. I never ran track. Shocker, right?

Then we went to the museum, which was entirely brilliant, but I will just link to a couple of photos because there are better ones elsewhere on the internet.

A bit of foreshadowing: when we got to the museum, several members of our tour group broke out into loud complaints about the lack of air conditioning (“what kind of country IS this? how do they LIVE?”) and the crowds. I’m not entirely sure how a person goes to Olympia and expects to walk around in solitude. We were so annoyed. We were more annoyed later.

ANYway, the museum houses a lovely statue of Nike

And the very famous Hermes of Praxiteles. Emilia described baby Dionysus in this statue as “anxious,” and it’s one of my favorite sound bites in my head: AHNKH-shee-oos. She also strongly recommended that we check out The Holy Butt of Hermes.

Nice, right? (Note to self: start working out.)

At one point, I was standing to the side perusing crumbly old objects when I noticed a super tall, gorgeous-looking dude staring off with a “bow-chikka-bow-wow!” expression on his face.

“Niiiice,” says I.

Turns out he was staring at my sister.

Awesome.

Then we bought up gobs of souvenirs at the gift shop, including tzatziki mix, tremendous herbs, and tiny statues that now live on my dresser and my desk. We rode the Fear Bus back to Katakolon and found a table in the shade at a restaurant right on the edge of the water. Mom and I ordered a a liter of “wine from a barrel” (according to the menu). It was good. Really, really good.

We had feta (lower left corner), souvlaki, and fried eggplant chips that are the first eggplant I’ve had in years that I enjoyed. They were outrageous.

Then I had my ego smashed flat.

There was a cat,  you see. A pretty little cat.

She wanted FUDZ and I had one bite of souvlaki left. So I held it down, and she came over to eat it.

“Nice, jerk. Where’s more?” she said. I thought “errr,” then held down a bit of potato.

That cat sniffed the potato, looked at me, put out her claws, and smacked the potato straight out of my hand. My response was a frantic search for a suitable offering. I held down a bit of the very good bread.

She didn’t even bother to sniff it. She knocked the bread out of my hand and looked at me with scorn more withering than that of my first mother-in-law.

In so many ways, I am unworthy.

kittyyyyyyyyy!

Ahem.

Then we walked the streets of Katakolon and came back with approximately 19 bags apiece. We were so sure we had solved the Greek debt crisis all on our own.

That night, our next-to-last night on the ship, I threw myself dramatically onto the floor to protest the horror that was The Up Bed.

Guess what I found? A trundle under one of the other beds! It had been there the whole time. It was MUCH more comfortable than The Up Bed. Ay yi yi.

We spent the next day trundling around the ship and resting. I went to the casino with my mother and discovered that I apparently make all slot machines wish to crawl away weeping. She said she had never lost $20 so quickly – less than 5 minutes.

The next morning, we awoke in Venice.

(As usual, most pictures are my sister’s.)