Marble curb and gutter in Athens. Photo by D R Pico and may be freely used, with appropriate credit.

Mrs Pico’s and my vacation in Greece is over, and I’m back at the computer typing in my hopefully-not-completely-mindless drivel! My thanks to William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove for keeping this poor site going for the last two weeks.

Greece is a beautiful, if very arid-looking country, but one thing really, really, really annoyed me. Athens is supposed to be the crown jewel of that ancient nation, full of ancient monuments. We climbed the Acropolis to visit the Parthenon, we visited the Temple of Zeus, and we saw things created by the hand of man 2,500 years ago. Even Jerusalem doesn’t boast signs of civilization that old, other than just a couple of places where stones from the original Temple built by Solomon 2,900 years ago can be seen.

As a Catholic, it was interesting to have walked some of the same streets as St Paul on his visit to the city. (Acts 17:16-34)

We climbed on Mt Olympus, because I wanted to have a talk with Zeus, but, alas! he was nowhere to be found.

Athens is so magnificent that, as in the picture on the right, there are streets on which the very curb-and-gutters are made of marble. The photo is on a side street devoted to restaurants just a block from our hotel.

But Athens is an absolutely filthy city! It seems that every block is scrawled with graffiti, major amounts of graffiti, graffiti as high as the “artists” can reach. How can a city so dependent upon the euros of tourists let itself become so defaced and dirty? The European Union has designated several sites in Greece with the European Historical Label, and are national parks in the Hellenic Republic.

The rest of Greece? Much cleaner — except Thessaloniki — and amazingly inexpensive. Our meals in Kefalonia and Litochoro cost half, or even less, than what they would have cost in a comparable American city. Real estate was so inexpensive that we saw, and considered a detached beachfront house in Kefalonia for only 315,000€.

OK, OK, I considered the house, but my darling bride — of 46 years, 4 months, and six days — was pretty much vetoing it, saying, truthfully I’m afraid, that we couldn’t afford it. Our current property, were it located in Massachusetts or Maine would be worth more than that, but in low-cost Kentucky, it isn’t.

Litochoro? Mrs Pico would have considered that, a town just 20 minutes from Aegean Sea beaches and Mt Olympus.

We visited the ancient monasteries at Meteora, including the one featured in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only.

Greece is a great place to visit, but not for the reasons and places that most people would expect.

There was one thing that I regretted, not being able to write on this site because I didn’t take a computer, and that was we left just before the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But, in retrospect, perhaps that was a good thing, because I wasn’t able to write anything stupid by jumping the gun on things.