Dateline: Olympia, Greece. Today was spent driving, for many hours in the tour bus, along the winding coastline of Greece, often hurtling at what felt like breakneck speeds around hairpin turns that I wouldn’t have sent my vintage Hot Wheels down a ramp to navigate, never mind that giant bus that we were in.

The scheduled stop was in Olympia, at the site of the first Olympics. However, the drive was a little much for Jes and myself, so we sat that part of the excursion out and took some time for ourselves in the quaint little village of Olympia. It was delightful, and we had the best little oasis from the group.

We took our time looking; the tourist season hadn’t kicked in yet, and it was the middle of the week, so the town was nearly empty. It was extremely pleasant to just chat up the locals, pet their dogs, drink their coffee, and buy their tchotchkes. One of them gave me his last, battered map of the Delphi site for free. And everyone was very nice.

When we rejoined the tour, we all got back on the bus and drove for another three hours. It was, all in all, great scenery, zipping by at 80 km, but it would have been nice to stop and really see some of it. But we were on a timetable, and it involved getting to the coast. There are more ruins in our future.

At the last rest stop of the day, I decided to offload some of my coins into one of those crane games. Well, I offloaded one coin. A one dollar euro was all it took. I pulled Two-Face here out on the first go-round. Old habits die hard. I turned to everyone who was watching and yelled, “Are you not entertained?”

Our guide looked at me, goggle-eyed. He said, “I’ve never seen anyone actually get something out of those machines before in my whole life.”

“My crane technique is not to be trifled with,” I said. He didn’t get the reference. That’s okay, he was still going on about it two hours later.

“You just put one coin in? On the first try? That’s amazing!”

I’d walked Delphi and the Acropolis already. This? This was nothing.