Dunham Family and My Stroke Story!

We left Greece and bordered a ship at Patras. It was supposed to be an overnight trip leaving at 7 PM arriving by noon the next day arriving at the port of Acona, Italy. Then a three hour bus ride through Tuscany to Florence. Instead, the ferry left at 8:00 PM and in the middle the night we stopped Albania for a couple of hours. There is mix up with food. The cabin were incredibly claustrophobic. It was almost oppressive. We basically have the whole day on the shelf for the kids played Uno and lounged around. That night the high school kids enjoyed the onboard disco. Heather did win €125 in the casino. After a 22 hour boat ride, we boarded a bus for a 3 1/2 hour ride.  It was an exhausting ordeal actually.  The next day we explored Florence. Stay tuned for the next blog post.

Being a history buff, I’ve always understood that the Catholic Church was split in about 1000 A.D. Our Greek tour guide mentioned the differences a little bit yesterday, but she did not capture the full history. Today I saw a small Greek orthodox by the roadside and I’m going to insert about the history. Eastern Orthodox Catholics and Roman Catholics are the result of what is known as the East-West Schism (or Great Schism) of 1054, when medieval Christianity split into two branches. The Byzantine split with Roman Catholicism came about when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, King of the Franks, as Holy Roman Emperor in 800. From the Byzantine viewpoint, this was a slap to the Eastern Emperor and the Byzantine Empire itself — an empire that had withstood barbarian invasions and upheld the faith for centuries. After Rome fell in 476, Byzantium was the only vestige of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne’s crowning made the Byzantine Emperor redundant, and relations between the East and...

Today we arrived in Delphi after the three hour bus ride. The scenery is amazing. This is Greece I’ve heard about: Cobblestone streets, quaint shops and restaurants, and crazy one-way streets! And the smallest bathroom we’ve ever seen. 

We had the opportunity to go to Europe for spring break. Yesterday on Saturday, we toured Athens.  We saw the temple of Poseidon which was stunning.  The temple of Poseidon at Sounion was constructed in 444–440 BC. This was during the ascendancy of the Athenian statesman Pericles, who also rebuilt the Parthenon in Athens. It was built on the ruins of a temple dating from the Archaic period. It is perched above the sea at a height of almost 60 metres (200 ft). The design of the temple is a typical hexastyle, i.e., it had a front portico with six columns.[6] Only some columns of the Sounion temple stand today, but when intact it would have closely resembled the contemporary and well-preserved Temple of Hephaestus beneath the Acropolis, which may have been designed by the same architect. As with all Greek temples, the Poseidon building was rectangular, with a colonnade on all four sides. The total number of original columns was 34: 15 columns still stand today. The columns are of...