South America is calling

Yes, it is official...we have booked out trip to Machu Pichu and the Galapagos Islands for April 2015!!!
Can you hear the drum rolls?
We are so very excited...we were invited by a couple of friends to join their group after we mentioned that we had postponed our South America trip. It seems that fate had other plans!

Get ready because I intend to do a cooking class and to take some awesome pics!

Our travel consultant Lady Sanchez (who was kind enough to take us on) from ADVENTUREPERU is wonderful!

We look forward to meeting her and having a fantastic adventure with our friends!

Olive trees and .... have never seen so many!

Greece is a wonderful country full of richness and fruit of every description. We have seen olive trees (forests) everywhere we went. We have also seen oranges, figs, plums, pears, apples, peaches, apricots, grapes (of course) and yesterday bananas... I expected a lot of fruit trees but not ....

greenhouses!

The country is warm most of the year so why the towns of greenhouses? The growing season here is most likely two or even three crops per year. I was amazed at how many greenhouses there are in many places in Greece from north to south...literally greenhouse landscape the size of fairly large towns. Actually larger than some towns here...

 

But then there are always the olive groves...nicely laid out against the harshest of landscapes... this is Greece!

 

Museum hopping and site-seeing

We have visited three museums and four archaeological sites in the past two days. It seems that we love it!

This is a reproduction of an ancient kitchen storage cabinet with all the clay storage jars and serving dishes... looks pretty good to me! We saw this at the Archeological Museum at Thessiloniki. The museums here are absolutely wonderful. Well laid out and easy to navigate.

 

Now I would say that this is a large container... it is called a pithoi and was used for storage. It would take a lot of  wine, water, olive oil or olives to fill this jar and this is not a big one!

 

This is a more modern method of storage. We stopped at a fruit stand along the side of the road and Anna was very nice to show us all the products she cans every year. We tried some of the canned cherries at our hotel and it was amazing...like very good Cherries Jubilee...only better!

 

This is Anna with her produce.

The herbs and spices she grows...

 

This is the biggest pommegranite I have ever seen. About the size of a large grapefruit! The 'normal' sized one is small in comparison.