Driving a Marathon

The Greek soldier Philippides ran from the town of Marathon to Athens in 490 BCE to announce the Greek victory over the Persians. Or maybe he ran to Sparta to call in reinforcements. The truth behind the legend is lost in myth and retellings like so many of the historical stories of ancient Greece.

Either way, the the two ancient cities were two places we passed through on our month tour of Greece, Marathon at the beginning of our trip and Sparta at the end of it.

There are so many ruins, castles, idyllic villages, islands, beaches and mythical sites in Greece that one could spend a years time rushing around and still miss most of them. We had a month. And we missed most of them.

We did see quite a bit though.

This was an unusual way to travel for us as we typically spend at least a week in each place, sometimes longer. And with kids in online school, juggling activities and school work can be exhausting.

The month went by in a flash though, and I had no plan for where to go once September came to an end. I tried to get an extension on the rental car, hoping that the October rate would be lower, but instead they quoted me double. So on September 30th, we packed up the car and began driving from the southern Peloponnese towards Athens to return the car.

This drive took us along the windy roads of the Mani Peninsula to the city of Sparta, a name that everyone has heard even if they know little of how influential the ancient city state has been on European civilization.

The Spartans emphasized military proficiency to such a degree that the society operated like a military school. The Spartan way of life became known for its directness, its simplicity and its effectiveness. This inspired societies and governments through the ages, from Spartan contemporaries to the fascists of the twentieth century.

Our style of travel might have had us spending a week in Sparta, exploring what is left of the ancients, the ruins in an olive grove north of town, a modern statue of Leonidas, the almost mythical leader who fought the Persian invasion. Maybe we would climb Mount Taygetos, the highest peak of the Peloponnese and grueling rite of passage climb for young Spartans.

Instead, with a long drive ahead of us, we only had time to stop for a picnic in the grove before continuing along the road to the old Greek capital of Nafplion where we stopped for the night.

With the car due back the next morning, I got up before sunrise to drive back to Athens alone with the plan to return to Nafplion in the evening by bus. The route from here to Athens is littered with history: roadside ruins, hilltop castles and small sign after small sign inviting me to follow a dirt turnoff to some historical relic. With the car due back in hours, and first light sneaking over the horizon, all I can do is drive.

Google maps, however, has decided to play a joke on me and directs me off the highway to a footbridge over the Corinthian canal. As many times as I reroute, the map corrects back to the footbridge route and eventually I end up on a desolate dirt road leading to a wobbly footbridge over the canal.

Numerous attempts were made to build a canal through this 6-kilometer wide strip of land that connects the Peloponnese to Athens and Attica, the first being in the 7th century BCE. It was finally completed some 2600 years later, but it still doesn’t seem to work very well.

There is nothing around the canal here but wind, dust, some abandoned bunkers and a fenced-in sewage treatment plant. It wasn’t easy to get a good view of the canal. The plant seems to have converted the footbridge into a giant sewer line and it was difficult to get near the steep edge as the loose cliff side sand seems to be collapsing into the canal. From what I could see into the deep canal below, it didn’t appear to be passable by boat.

I got back in the car and continued my drive with google insisting every couple of minutes that I make a u-turn and return to the sewage bridge until I found a road sign directing me to the highway bridge and on to Athens.

I hoped that in our month in Greece we would figure out where to go next, but that still hasn’t happened so instead we will stay in Greece. And now that the car is gone, maybe it’s time to get ready for the next marathon.