Labels

06 December 2009

Hasta la vista Greece...



Tomorrow we start to leave Greece to take the boat to Palma.  The plan is to stop in Italy for a couple of days and then continue past Sicily and Sardinia to Mallorca.  We will be doing some work on the boat in Palma de Mallorca, and won't be back in Greece until about April next year.  I will probably be posting very intermittently for the next week until we arrive in Palma and get a new internet connection sorted out.  For now, I will leave you with some photos from our time in Greece.






The above three photos are from a fort above the lovely little town of Nafplion in the Peloppenese (about a two hour drive from where we live in Lavrio).



This little scene is just near where our boat is docked in Lavrio.



Prickly Pears!














Autumn leaves in the Peloppenese.



The temple of Poseidon, very near to where we live.  Somewhere on one of those columns Lord Byron the poet carved his initials in the 1800's but we couldn't get close enough to find it.

Farewell Greece!  Hope to see more of you next year!

Arabella Chickie in Greece

2 comments:

ChickieChirps said...

So Lord Byron was a bogan!!! Did you try eating Prickly Pears? They're supposed to be very good ice cold out of the fridge (peeled before hand, I'm told).

Save journey!!! We'll be thinking of you. Hope to see more fabulous photographs when you next have time to post.

My 'heritage' duvet cover is coming along just great. Will do some work on it today and (hopefully) post a photo for you to see. Still have the sheets to make, but do now have some good quality material albeit white.

Wishing you calm seas and an uneventful journey.

April Blackbird

ChickieChirps said...

Apparently Lord Byron started a craze for graffiti which almost ruined the Temple! We'll have to look for it, along with the elusive Nealite from the beaches!

Found some interesting info on it below:


Nealite is a very rare mineral. It was named for an American mineral collector, Neal Yedlin. Nealite is known from one locality, its type locality of Lavrio (formerly Lavrion and Laurium), Greece. Other rare minerals from this locality include paralaurionite, laurionite, ktenasite, zincaluminite, fiedlerite, penfieldite, serpierite, thorikosite, glaucocerinite, beudantite, georgiadesite and phosgenite to name just a few. This locality has been mined for centuries starting with the Greeks and then the Romans for the lead content of its ores. The left over rocks, that were judged too poor in the metals to be processed by the ancient miners, were dumped into the sea. Such mining dumps are called slag dumps. Today these dumps are being reprocessed for their valuable metals by modern ore processing techniques that are capable of extracting the metals from these ores. Analysis of these rocks have yielded some amazing new minerals. Some of these minerals were not there when the rocks were first mined centuries before. But they are there now! The sea water altered the low grade lead ores and produced a most unusual assortment of rare minerals of which nealite is one of them. Many people do not consider these minerals to be true minerals because their creation was indirectly aided by the actions of humans and therefore not exactly natural. Minerals must have a natural origin in order to be minerals. However, these minerals were only indirectly affected and the study of their origins is best left to mineralogists.
Nealite has a bright and attractive color. It is found only in microcrystals and is very hard to obtain for one's collection. But its beauty, rarity and interesting origin make it a very desirable mineral, especially for micromounters.