On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
way2blue
In 2018 we returned to Greece. This time we stayed on the mainland, heading to the village of Gerolimenas on the Mani Peninsula of Peloponnese. We stayed in a stone warehouse built in the 1870s which had recently been converted into a small hotel. Still owned by the same family. (My Greek friend had stayed there with her sister.)

We made this journey with friends from high school who hadn’t yet ventured beyond Canada, and asked if they could join us on one of our adventures. Fortunately they are hearty people, as simply finding our hotel in Athens the first night, then finding our way to Gerolimenas the next day were adventures in themselves. In part since none of us had decent mapping available on our mobile phones, with each phone gave different directions. Complicated by road signs written in Greek (duh). Which I would try to decode on the fly…

We arrived in Gerolimenas just as Cyclone Xenophon was approaching. (The receptionist was amused that this storm was named for a male rather than female; an Athenian military commander from ~400 B.C.) We were buffeted by strong winds on our hike the first day. As the storm passed just to the south, staff emptied the swimming pool, set up a sandbag barricade, closed shutters, and also barricaded most of the dining room doors with stout poles. (I joked to our friends, ‘Can we show you a good time or what!’… ) We spent one rainy day at Diros Caves, a 1.6 km-long subterranean stream near the village of Gytheion. In a skiff that our guide poled through crystal clear water. Amazing. No photos alas.

Same view after the storm had passed. While sequestered in our room with a view of the bay, we watched a small anchored boat become swamped and sink. Slow motion tragedy.

Basketball hoop in a nearby village. Most of the villages seemed half abandoned. And we rarely saw children outside playing. When we asked why, the staff told us that many farmers moved to Athens during the economic crisis, leaving the olive groves untended…

Old door in the village with the bay visible through the stone arches.

Beautiful religious art work displayed in the chapel, Agios Nikolaos, at the point.

A couple cows watching my return from the village of Ano Mpoulari—sizing me up, and thinking ‘should I stay or should I bolt’…

Native cyclamen along trail to the chapel.
eclare
Interesting photos! How did you pick Gerolimenas?
Mary G
Native cyclamen! Beautiful place.
MazeDancer
Lovely photos
Geminid
Besides having a storm named after him, Xenophon was an author as well as a general. His books Anabasis and the Kyropedia(sp?) were published in the modern era and are still in print, both in Greek and in English. Thank you for the pictures. I’ll probably never visit Greece, but I love to learn about the country. I am sad that those olive groves are going untended. It’s been a tough decade for Greece.
JanieM
Pictures like this set me thinking about how every landscape is someone’s home turf, as familiar and “ordinary” as NE Ohio, Maine, and a couple of other states are to me. And yet to me, the places in the pics are exotic, and to go there would be to have a big adventure and be jolted out of my day-to-day mental ruts. Pics in OTR are the next best thing.
I love the b-ball hoop in the old stone wall. The thought of untended olive groves is another matter.
Miss Bianca
@Geminid: Which one is his manual on horsemanship? The first in Western history? Among other things, Xenophon was a master horseman and trainer.
way2blue
I picked this spot based on the recommendation of a Greek friend who had stayed there a couple years earlier. We often pick places based on quizzing people we meet while traveling. In fact, I asked the receptionist here which were her 3 favorite Greek islands…
@eclare:
way2blue
@Geminid: Yes! When I checked why Xenophon? I found that he was not only an exceptional military commander and student of Socrates, but also an esteemed historian and philosopher.
way2blue
@JanieM: Yes. We tend to pick places to visit that have not undergone significant tourist development, so as to see traditional culture. In Greece it’s been sobering to see the economic strain. The owners of farm (Red Tractor Farm) where we stayed on Kea was working with the locals to harvest & process acorns for tanning. In hopes of saving some of the last oak trees in the Cyclades, but also to strengthen alternate livelihoods to tourism.