We went back to Greece again the next summer.

Aunt Mary was overjoyed. She took us right away to Kamari.

She arranged a place for us to stay. It was with a relative, probably a cousin, who had a house set back by itself in a large plot of land otherwise empty, surrounded by a high chain link fence without a gate.

You got in by climbing a ladder lowered to you, then over the top and down another ladder, the first one pulled up and kept inside the fence. By prior arrangement, you could meet the owner at a specified time and he would lower the ladder.

I wish I could remember his name, because he was solicitous and patient, carefully chosen by Aunt Mary. I’ll call him Stavros.

He was a retired chef, provided us a room with a bed, spoke little English, could be reached by phone if we were out and about and needed to get back in at an unarranged hour.

One time he had cooked dinner for us, but it wasn’t clear that we were expected, we got home late, had eaten elsewhere, and he grudgingly lowered the ladder. I don’t remember if there were leftovers.

He pretty much kept to himself. I didn’t know how to get to know him better, and Aunt Mary had arranged the accommodation as room only. She didn’t want to tie us down to a schedule, and said, “Go travel some more in our beautiful country,” so we hit the road.

We had our Eurail passes which covered the busses, and we looked at the map.

In no particular order, these are some of the things we saw, places we went to. We were exploring the Peloponnese.

We went by Nemea and thought of Herakles and the Nemean lion. We left paw prints.

We went to the Theater of Epidavros (Epidaurus). That’s an ancient amphitheater, like the ones scattered throughout Greece, and they scheduled performances of the Greek classics, attracting travelers with tourist money, but playing to the locals who knew the plays.

We saw The Trojan Women. The play was in Greek, but we had our booklets, and the play was so intelligently professionally presented that we were immersed into the experience.

How modern the Greeks are! To take their ancient play from the millenial past and stage it for a modern audience, complete with lighting and sound and special effects.

The captured Trojan women were in a concentration camp reminiscent of Nazi, with sirens and rotating searchlights. When it went completely dark we could see here and there in the audience like fireflies lights come on and off as tourists turned on their flashlights to look at their programs to figure out what was happening.

The essence of the play was intact, its integrity preserved. They were telling us, “See! We Greeks started everything, and we keep it going.”

When I got back to school, I could tell my class, “I was there!”

I wish all modern theater directors showed such respect for their material.

I remember when we went over the Corinthian Canal above the Gulf of Corinth. We were on a train on a bridge trestle, and way down below was the water, the sloping sides of the gorge angled with precision, a major engineering feat. I thought of the Panama Canal, which I’ve never seen live in person, but which is another iconic canal, a marvel of engineering in the catalog of canals, and here I was crossing over another iconic canal as a tribute to how clever man is to shift the earth to suit his needs, to engineer away obstacles to his odyssey. I looked down to see the long boat with oars pulling toward the Bosphorus, Odysseus (Ulysses) on his ten year quest to return home, Jason and his Argosy on his quest for the golden fleece. Oh, what I could tell my students, the excitement of the moment, literature alive, my footsteps following the footsteps of history!

We walked through the Lion Gate at Mycenae, that bronze age citadel built by cyclops labor, verifying the presence of lions in ancient Greece. The lions are some of the oldest stone sculptures in history. They spoke to me and I spoke back. Shirley said, “Here kitty kitty.” The gate looked smaller than I expected. People told me that everyone was shorter then. Apparently I was born in earlier times.

I wanted to go all the way down to the end of the Peloponnese to Kalamata, because I love the olives. But life gives you more opportunities than you can experience and time limits your options, so we never got that far.

But I remember going by bus to Nafplion. The town impressed me in many ways.

In the center of town, at the junction where the road splits, to the right following the seashore, the left continuing through the small city, there was an English bookstore, advertising books in English for anyone who felt the need for reassurance in a Europe of so many languages finally ending in a country which spoke Greek. I was very excited, thinking we could live here and have our bookstore!

But I calmed myself down with further and sobering reflections. This store had cornered the market of bookstores in English, and I doubted that the town could sustain another one. So we’d have to buy out the store and ship our 60,000 books over to overwhelm the shelves, then spend the rest of our lives waiting for customers who wanted books in English.

We didn’t have the money, and they probably didn’t want to sell anyway, and we weren’t ready to reduce our still young lives to sitting long days waiting for people who were able to travel to places we’d never see because we were chained to the spot…

Which is why Sterling Books never opened in Nafplion.

But the town was lovely, had character, buildings with history, and the road that led along the water had restaurants lined up and waiting for us.

We chose a likely looking restaurant from all the possibilities, and had a wonderful dinner, fresh seafood drawn from the water at our feet, local wine, and a view of the harbor with a little island close enough to swim to, like the island I swam to in Lake Bled in Slovenia. This was a prison island, and I thought of Napoleon and Elba, and Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, a larger prison island and a longer swim. I felt like a warden of the Nafplion prison island, sitting at the restaurant and keeping an eye on the inmates across the narrow water.

I forgot to mention, or should have said it first, that when we got into town and off the bus, we needed a place to stay. We had our booklet to guide us, and our own eyes which saw choices, some around a grassy tree-lined central park. We chose a two (or three?) story hotel around the corner but with a view of the park. It was highly recommended.

Comfortable room, good breakfast. As we ate happily, preparing for the day to get out, explore, ramble, we saw a group of fellow travelers speaking French descend to the breakfast room. It was a bevy of nuns in full habit, eagerly occupying a table and filling their plates. They were laughing and giggling like school girls out on an excursion.

I thought of that time, in the fourth grade, living in Buffalo, when my mother and her sister took me and my brother to see Niagara Falls. We went on the Maid of the Mist, the open boat that takes you almost right up to the base of the falls where the water sprays you like rain. They dress you in a raincoat with a hood. A group of nuns on holiday were trying to fit themselves into the raincoats, giggling like school girls because the hoods wouldn’t fit over their headdresses.

I thought about all those religious orders that sequester their anointed ones in convents and seminaries, removed from the world they grew up in but who still remember their childhood. God may have removed them from daily life in the larger world, but they’re still human beings with memories of young joy.

I looked at Shirley across the breakfast table, and was so glad that I didn’t become a priest.

One of the tourist must-sees in the guidebook is the Fortress of Palamidi. It’s on a cliff overlooking the town and the water on both sides. The stairway to the top is legendary.

The thousand steps were the proving ground like a final exam. In order to join the army, a soldier in full armor had to run up the thousand steps without stopping to the fortress at the top. If he made it, he was qualified. If not, he washed out.

We didn’t run up, but we climbed all the way. We were young. We looked down the other side to the bay with the exclusive cove and exclusive hotel where the wealthy posed on the balcony while servants brought food and drink. Shirley’s dad and mother stayed there with the same mentality that took them so often to Las Vegas.

We were on the real people holiday, squeezing the life out of our pennies and living it to the hilt.

When we got to the top, the Fortress was closed. There was a sign on the door explaining.

So often in Europe we encountered the “closed” signs, like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, or the museum in Budapest. Apparently the employees would go on strike and shut things down until demands were met. We have some of those traditions in America, and need to “never forget” them, lest we lose our Democracy.

So at the Palamidi Fortress we only peeked in to see the courtyard, but we had made it to the top of the thousand steps and felt qualified for anything.

We had been to Greece two summers in a row. We had bonded with Aunt Mary. We wanted to go back.

But the IRS intervened. I had written off some of the trip as educational expense, documenting what I would be teaching in my classes. Colleagues had advised me about how to fill out the forms.

The IRS didn’t see it that way. We were called in to the audit. What documents justified the expense? Class syllabuses didn’t cut it. I verified that I included The Trojan Women in my World Lit. class, but the auditor was unimpressed, and grudgingly only allowed the expense of the tickets. I had to pay back mostly everything.

That ended our European vacations.

Life isn’t fair.

The experience did infuse my teaching. My stories were vivid, and I took the students with me.

And I hired an accountant to do my taxes. He was a friend and colleague who was certified and did taxes on the side. He found valid exemptions I would never have thought of.

It’s good advice to find an expert and then trust them.

Europe is still there, waiting for me to come back.