Greece has many wonderful places to be discovered, thus last week we headed towards the Peloponnese Peninsula, in the search of such a place. To get to our special destination in Kalogria, we passed the Corinth Canal which really left me somewhat astounded at the result of such many years of work. Starting from the ground level almost at the first bridge to about 100 meters in the highest spot…Looking down did make me dizzy.

One of the interesting things about the first bridge is that it submerges instead of being lift up as I would have expected it.

We followed the road on the coast until we reached Rio where I was interested in seeing the Charilaos Trikoupis bridge at night, most commonly known as the Rio – Antirrio bridge. This bridge built in the mid 90’s and opened for public in August 2004, connects the Peloponnese to the mainland Greece. The bridge at its length of 2880 meters is the world’s second longest cable-stayed deck bridge.

The night slowly came down and my waiting for the bridge lights to get turned on was in vain, because…well I guess the photo I saw of the bridge in the night was taken at opening or holidays…lol…But the sunset was beautiful so it worth the wait.

We reached Kalogria later in the evening and after a well deserved dinner, we choose a spot to park the car in the darkness around us and sleep without knowing what sights the morning had laid out for us. The morning did come, and it shocked me with the views it enchanted us. As soon as I opened my eyes I took my shoes on and grabbed my camera in a rush. This was one of the most beautiful sunrises I ever saw in my life, and the magical silhouettes of the umbrella trees and Prokopos lagoon shocked me. We had finally reached our destination, the Strophylia forest and the wetlands.

A little to the side a chapel rested peacefully between the mist at the base of the Mavro Ori mountain.

The morning continued with our exploration of the place, and headed us to the beach of Kalogria where big sand dunes had many treasures to hide for Cosmin. But you can read about that in his blog. I on the other hand rested for a while on the beach and waited to get stinged by a wasp…that was painful and a pain in the a** for the next couple of days.

After making some four-legged friends which would not loose us from their sight and ran after the car for a few km after I fed them with some caju, we were some people with a mission, and that was releasing Miruna…a lizard (Ophisaurus Apodus) which I baptized with this name when it was given to us from the University in Athens to release back in its natural habitat.

In the area we also found some fortifications, the Ancient Dyme fortifications and while around there we had a nice encounter with a praying mantis. Cosmin had some fantastic raptors posing for him so he was happy.

In the evening we took the road back to Athens with a detour and this time we decided to cross the Rio – Antirrio bridge…well we knew there was going to be a toll, but the amount they charged was quite high for us…11.70 euro.

We stopped for dinner in Eratini at a small Pizzeria where we had an excellent service and plenty of food, and this was after getting ourselves somewhat lost through some villages from which our GPS could not find an entry for the national road.

That’s all folks ! Stay tuned from scenes of our next…post ???

Coming up…Ramnous Archeological site and…ok I ain’t telling ya