First day in Athens

Today was another travel day, but this morning we woke up early to go back to the Olympia site to run the 192 meter Stade where Alexander the Great competed. Chad, Drew, Jake, Brett, "Big" Matt, and "Little" Matt all ran. In a controversial finish, the winner was......."Big"MATT!!!! Due to an illegal start by all other contestants, Big Matt won the race in a one step finish and fell to his knees in VICTORY.

There will be an epic video added later by Professor Ryan of the true victor.

After the race, we had time to walk around Olympia before getting on the bus to Athens. Robert, our tour guide, showed us the rest of the "pre interesting" and "post interesting" monuments of Olympia like Phillip II, the father of Alexander the Great. We spent about a half hour in Olympia and then were off to Athens. The bus ride took about 5 hours with a stop in between for lunch. Everyone slept the whole ride this time, which made it much quieter and relaxing. In no time we were in Athens checking into our hotel. We relaxed for about 2 hours then went for a walk to get our bearings straight. We first walked to the Zappeion building built for the Zappa's Olympics in the late 1800s. Then we visited the Panathenaic Stadium built in 1896 for the first modern Olympics; which was reconstructed and marbled in 2004 and is now being used for the Special Olympics in 2011. We couldn't get any closer to the stadium than outside the gates but it looked amazing from what I could see. After getting pictures of that, we walked around the area and stopped to watch a tennis match between four younger looking Greek boys. They were impressive players and had us all clapping for them like it was the French Open. Everyone enjoyed watching their match but soon enough we got hungry and went in search of a restaurant. We had dinner at a nice Greek restaurant and topped it off with a scoop of Gelato afterwards. We walked around for a bit, shopped at a couple of the stores until it got late, and then went back to the hotel to call it a night. I'd have to say it was a good start to the last destination of our trip.