But the love had a good time in his short 35 years b/c he saw the world.

It did not taste brackish.

 

 
 

The Oracle at Delphi -- Δελφοι

A smokey haze began to gently waft through the chamber. The pilgrims came forward, and the oracle did gaze upon them. Seated in her chair, she breathed deeply and began to convulse. A great tremor swept through her, and she began to utter a sequence of guttural sounds while her head shook violently in all directions. The pilgrims did look upon this sight in wonder, and an excitement tempered with a sense of unease filled their souls. Eventually the oracle ceased her great convulsions, and the priest did speak these words:

"By the Grace of Apollo you have been granted a vision of the future. It shall come to pass that a great conflict will arise between East and West. The soul of the West shall be bled dry, and the East shall rejoice at the spoils of war. And there will also be much walking, walking, walking, until the West expires, and dies forgotton, and really really tired."

...and then I woke up....

So, the next morning we did explored the ancient site of Delphi, and we got there first (again). We saw the temple. We saw a tunnel that led into the basement of the temple, but since we were too chicken, and had no reliable form of light, and didn't want to get deported, we chose not to explore it.

 
Acting!
Lin-Wei took her turn in the theater of Delphi, spinning a tale of a young woman who finds love, spends a lot of time trying to motivate that love off the couch and into a plane, getting that love out of bed early in the morning for one damn adventure vacation after another, only to lose that love at age 35 due to exhaustion. It was a tragic tale indeed.

We were lucky enough to beat most of the tour groups in again, so we got to explore much of the site on our own. They also had a pretty cool museum there.

 
The water that created this log
They had a natural spring fed from the waters of Mt. Parnassos just outside the Delphi site, and we took a drink. It was supposed to make you very well spoken and verbose. An unfortunate side-effect was very bloated travelogue. Unfortunate for you, that is. Ha! Funny! We then explored the Temple of Artemis, and then went back to our hotel.

When we were done with Delphi we had the whole afternoon free, so we drove to a local town named Lavadia. Very quaint and relaxing, but parking was a bit of a problem. We drove around the downtown area for about 20min, and we were unable to find a spot that didn't have a sign that stated in no uncertain terms....ah.... we weren't really sure what it stated, but it had numbers on it that we think indicated that you needed a permit to park there. But we parked there anyway! We'd only be there for an hour or two, so we decided to risk it.

 
Lavadia
The first thing we needed was lunch, so we found a nice outdoor place, and owner gave us a menu. Horror of horrors, it was just an ice cream shop! We need some real food, so we waited until he was busy inside the shop, and then got the hell out of there. We went to another outdoor place two doors down, and we were able to get a table that didn't have a direct line of sight to the place we abandoned. And we had some decent food.

The town had a central waterway running through it, so we explored that for a bit. Halfway down the river we were close to the car, so I ran up there to check and see if we had a parking ticket. So far so good! We explored for another half-hour or so, and then went to collect Big Red. He was clean, so I snapped a photo of the parking sign so that Andy could translate it for us. Maybe it said, "No parking, except for really small rental cars and such."

And that was it for Delphi and environs.