This is a short page. But then it only covers two days.
However, the original idea was that it wouldn't be there at all.
I had been in Athens and I had two days off.
And I got the idea of doing nothing. Nothing at all.
A simple vacation.
I booked a place at a beach resort in Loutraki.
Nothing to do but to lie at the beach all day. Maybe read a book. Possibly get a suntan.
In the end, I didn't do much.
Two museum visits, one boat tour, a bit of walking.
Still, the 'do nothing at all' vacation didn't work.
I went to Loutraki as it is close to Athens. I didn't have much time, so going to one of the Greek islands wasn't an option.
There's also little to do near Loutraki. Especially as I was in a resort a bit outside of the town.
I rented a car in Athens and drove to Loutraki.
As I got there around noon, which was too early to check in, I drove on to the Melagavi lighthouse.
You can't visit the lighthouse itself, but the scenery next to it is good for a walk and looks great.
Later I checked into the resort and said hello to the inevitable cat.
(A vacation in Greece isn't a proper vacation if there aren't cats around.)
I'm not sure whether there's a designated cat for every bungalow, but that is the only cat I've seen at the place. It seemed to live on my terrace. And looked slightly confused when I was out there as well.
After a while, I went down to the beach, went to one of the sun beds (fortunately, the resort was mostly empty, and also a bit upscale, so there wasn't any silly business with reserving a place with a towel early in the morning), opened up the umbrella next to it and started to bask in the sun.
That got boring surprisingly quickly.
Less than an hour later, I was back in my room.
Sitting on the terrace, being tolerated by the cat, was a lot more comfortable.
In the evening, at sunset, I went to the pool bar, got me a cocktail, took a beach chair and enjoyed the sunset. Which was nice for 15 minutes, then I got bored again.
The "superb selection of restaurants" that the place had been advertising turned out to be one restaurant.
There were three restaurants on their web page that seemed interesting, but what the resort web page failed to mention is that they don't open until June. There was neither a "a fine dining experience", nor the "culinary adventure of the senses" with "delicious dishes that will impress you" available. They also failed to offer "traditional Greek recipes with a fresh twist, prepared only with the finest, locally-sourced ingredients". (At least for the last one they state on their web site that it "operates, weather permitting, from mid June".)
So the only restaurant that was open was the main restaurant, which offered only a dinner buffet.
(Well, they claimed that you could also order a la carte, but the menu they had was the room service menu. So yes, I could have eaten a salad or a club sandwich for dinner. But I could have had those in my room as well.)
At that point I was sure that spending the next day at the beach was not what I was going to do.
Since there's not much to do in the area (which was why I selected the place), I decided to do a boat tour up and down the Corinth Canal. It's a small canal, which, in theory, provides a shortcut for ships, so that they can avoid a detour around the Peloponnese.
How much of a shortcut that is seems unclear. The English Wikipedia claims that it saves 700 km, while the German version mentions 400 km.
The web page of the company managing the canal has a maximum reduction of 195 nautical miles (about 360 km), as that covers the distances of plausible shipping routes. And even that distance is from Patras, which is at the northern end of the Peloponnese. If you take a more plausible starting point, like the Straits of Messina, the distance saved is closer to 150 km.
In real life terms, the canal isn't much of a shortcut for anything these days.
Modern cargo or cruise ships are too large to fit through the canal, so they have to take the longer route in any case. Most of the traffic in the canal are sailing boats (and for most of those it seems like they go through the canal for the experience of doing so - and not to get anywhere faster) and the tourist ships that go up and down the canal a few times a day.
And this was what I was going to do.
The web page of the tour company doesn't give any specific timetable. As a result, I was at the pier about two hours too early and had some time to walk around a bit.
Conveniently, Greece is full of historic sites.
Not far from the canal is the Hexamilion wall, a fortification built about 1500 years ago, which was, supposedly, six (ancient Greek) miles long, hence the name.
It's not a big attraction (except in the physical sense). There's no sign pointing to it and nobody pays it any attention. (There is, however, a small sign right next to one section of it, explaining its history.)
But that's pretty much Greece in a nutshell. Too many historic places and buildings to pay attention to them all.
Another small (and less ancient) attraction was a sinking bridge.
In many places there are bridges across some river or canal which aren't tall enough for ships to pass below them.
Most of these places use bridges that either swivel sideways or upwards, in order to let the ships pass.
At Isthmus, the bridge dives down.
When a ship needs to pass, the bridge (and it actually is a bridge - it's not like a lock that blocks the flow of the water) is lowered to the ground of the canal.
Not a major attraction or a technical marvel, but interesting and unusual nonetheless.
Then it was time to go down the canal (and back again) on a ship.
Again, not the most exciting activity in the world. But better than being bored at the beach.
The rest of the day I drove around, walked a bit in the hills north of Loutraki. And tried to get to a natural rock arch in the sea near Alkion.
That didn't work.
The place is somewhat difficult to approach. (Or maybe not. Most web pages, copying each other, state that it is "one of the purest and untouched parts of Loutraki region as it has remained unknown for years, because of it's difficulty to access". (Usually, as I did as well, keeping all the grammar errors.) While people who actually went there stated "Actually it is not that difficult to reach. It is true that you need to walk a little bit up and down but it is fairly easy.")
I gave it a try, but there where some sort of works in the woods you need to walk through, so I didn't try to get to the place.
The road to get there was fun, though.
It's a little road through the hills. Few cars, but lots of turns and bends, so it was fun to drive with a little car (which I had this time).
While I didn't see the rock arch, I had a good time driving there and back. Better than lying in the sun.
And there was a good taverna with a great view next to that road as well, so I had some dinner there, instead heading back to the resort and going for the buffet again.
In the end, I had a nice and relaxing day off. Simply not quite the way I had planned it to be.
At least the resort had a car charging station.
That was something new I tried.
I had rented an electric car for the short vacation.
It was doubtlessly fun to drive.
With an electric engine, you get an impressive acceleration. Especially good on mountain roads. And with the low center of gravity, thanks to the weight of the batteries, it went smoothly around corners.
However, the downside is that you need to plan your vacation in detail. And avoid doing anything spontaneously.
The car would be great as a city car at home. Assuming you have a charging station available.
Then you can charge the car overnight. And the range of 250 km is sufficient for anything that you would normally do with a car at home during the day.
But on a vacation, things get complicated.
When I arrived at the resort, I had a range of about 50 km left. The batteries needed charging.
Luckily, the resort had four parking spots with charging points.
Using them was slightly awkward, as they needed a specific app. But that was quickly installed and reasonably user friendly (at least the user interface wasn't only in Greek). Slightly more effort than stopping at a petrol station. But not much. And if you already have an electric car, you probably have the apps for the main power companies already installed. It was an additional effort to install the app, register an account and enter payment details. But that only needs to be done once.
Charging took a surprisingly long time. Though I don't know how long.
I assumed that (as this was a dedicated car charging station), the car would be in some quickcharge modus and be recharged in less than an hour. I looked at the app (while in my room) from time to time, but it always had a status of "charging" and a transfer of "0 kWh". (I learned later that it would only give the amount of energy used when the charging had stopped. Not during the charging process. Confusing, but, again, more to do with the fact that I never used that app before.)
After a couple of hours, I went back to the car to check whether it was charging at all. The car dashboard showed that it was charging, that it was at about 85% and that it would take about another hour to be fully charged.
Not an issue. It was going to be on that parking spot all night. But it meant (I didn't check the precise times) that a full charge from a car charger took roughly five hours. Quite ok if you charge overnight, but a long time if you need to charge somewhere along the way. (I know that cars don't always charge in a linear manner and they might do quickcharging only to a certain point (like going to 80% in half an hour) and then switch to slower charging afterwards. Which might have been the case here, but I couldn't verify that.)
In any case, so far, so good.
However, my flight back home was two days later, with an early flight. Which meant I needed to be at the airport around 8 am.
I either could stay in Loutraki, get up around 5 am and drive to the airport from there.
Or go to a hotel nearer to the airport for the next night.
The hotel at the airport was expensive, so I went to a place about 10 km from the airport.
Which meant that I had to check out of the resort in the morning, drive to the other hotel and check in there in the late afternoon. Giving me all day to stop at places along the way.
Without straying too far.
The shortest route left me with about 100 km to spare. (And that's assuming that the "Distance remaining" info in the car was accurate. And driving as economically as possible.)
Any large detours were impossible.
I spent some time in the evening with different route planners, until I found an itinerary that got me to the airport with about 50 km of remaining distance left (as a safety buffer).
It turned out to be a good idea. I didn't have to do unexpected detours and I did drive sufficiently economical to have the planned reserve remaining. But if I had miscalculated, it would have been difficult to do something about it. I didn't know where any charging stations were located along the way. And at the hotel I was staying at, there was only street parking. And not sufficiently close to the hotel to use any sort of extension cable.
If the car would have had insufficient power left to reach the airport, things would have gotten complicated.
In summary: Electric cars are fun, nice to drive and probably good at home, but as a rental car, they are only useful if all you need to do is to go directly from one place to another. And you know where the charging stations are. For carefree driving around on a vacation, going where you please and where your whims take you, they are still less than ideal.
On the route I had planned, there were two museums to see.
I like visiting aeronautical museums and the Hellenic Air Force Museum was sufficiently close to the route I needed to take, so the visit didn't add that many kilometers.
Getting to the museum was distinctly odd.
It is located on an active military airbase.
You need to pass a guardhouse, where they take your passport and they give you a visitor's badge.
Only then can you continue to the museum area, with strict instruction not to deviate from the path to it.
I also needed to stop at the at a red traffic light to let some planes land. (The access road is directly at the end of the runway. Whenever a plane comes in to land, it (obviously) has the right of way and you can only continue once it has landed.
At the museum hangar itself, a soldier gives you a short introduction of what you can and can't do.
Given that it's military, it was surprisingly sensible.
You can't go to any area that is not part of the museum display. You can't go onto the active airfield. You can take pictures, but not of the current flight operations or anything other than the museum exhibits. (I hadn't expected to be allowed to take any pictures at all.)
I don't think that taking pictures of the planes in flight would have given away any military secret - as far as I could tell, there were three M-18 Dromader planes doing starting and landing exercises - but there might be 'proper' fighter planes operating there at other times. For them, the restrictions might make more sense. (I also assume that they were more worried about people taking pictures of the pilots than of the planes.)
The M-18 Dromader is not at all what you would expect to see at a military airbase, which would be obvious if I could show a picture of it. But, obviously, I can't. It looks a lot like the plane in the following picture (which was part of the exhibition, so I was allowed to take a photo), but without the top wing.
The museum had two outside areas, one in front and one at the back of a hangar, which housed the indoor exhibition.
Given that it is an air force museum, I had expected to see mostly fighter jets, but there were a fair number of passenger planes and small propeller planes on display as well.
Given that a lot of Greece consists of islands, they also had some amphibious planes on display.
What was unusual was that there was an actual amphibian animal visiting it.
In addition to the outside area, they also had a number of planes and helicopters inside the hangar.
In addition to the planes on display, there's also an area with 'partial airplanes', which are awaiting restauration (if they are lucky - it looks more like a airplane junkyard). But that section was off-limits, so I couldn't have a closer look or take pictures. They have bits of a Ju-52 there, which they recovered from 40 meters underwater near one of the Greek islands. But as the plane had been shot down (and 60 years on the bottom of the sea didn't help much either), it looked more like a bunch of corrugated iron sheds that got caught up in a tornado than a plane.
After leaving the museum (and getting my passport back), I didn't dare to visit another nearby attraction - the former Olympic Village (I knew it was nearby, but I didn't know how much of a detour it would be. And I didn't fancy being stranded with my car the next morning.)
It's supposedly an interesting 'lost place'. It was built as housing for the athletes of the 2004 Olympic Games, but is now mostly deserted and decaying. Checking it on the map later, it is directly adjacent to the air base (but on the other side from the entrance) and visiting it would have added less than 10 km to the trip. But I didn't know it then.
I followed my planned route and drove to Marathon.
There's a museum there dedicated to Marathon running.
Although I don't run, the museum turned out to be surprisingly interesting and better than I expected.
I had considered running a couple of meters down a street somewhere, only to be able to claim that I did a "Marathon Run" later. It seemed a bit silly, though. And somewhat dishonest. (One of these "Yes, technically it's true, but it's intentionally misleading." claims.) So I only went for a short Marathon walk to the Marathon Municipal Stadium, from which the annual "Athens Classic Marathon" starts.
I did follow the route of the "Athens Classic Marathon" for about 20 km before I had to turn off and head for my hotel.
There were permanent signs next to the road, stating "Athens Classic Marathon Course" and the number of kilometers since the start. But, somewhat ironically, the street doesn't have a continuous sidewalk. You couldn't simply jog or run from Marathon to Athens along the course. You can only follow it by car. (Except, of course, on the day of the Marathon itself, when the road is closed.)
In any case, I got to the hotel, found that there was no charging station or other charging option nearby and was glad that there was enough power left to make it to the airport the next morning.
And flew home.
As already mentioned, it was a short vacation and I didn't do much.
The concept of having a short vacation where I don't do anything at all, except for relaxing at a beach somewhere, however, still needs work.