Paestum

On President's Day we took advantage of Ted's day off to join with other homeschooling families headed to the Greek ruins in Paestum (city named for Poseidon, who, being the god of the sea, obviously helped the Greeks make the crossing to Italy!).  These are the best preserved Greek ruins outside of Greece, and we were eager to explore after hearing so many good things...among others, that this was the place to let the kids run and climb and enjoy!

Well...either the park officials didn't have much else to occupy them, or else the people who told us the kids were allowed to climb around visited on days when there were too many tourists for the officials to hover over, because we ended up with our own personal "vulture" who anxiously followed us from site to site, indicating that the kids were NOT, in fact, to do any climbing.  We still aren't sure if this is because they were simply afraid that someone would get hurt or if they were more concerned about the ruins getting, well, ruined!

At any rate, it was indeed a very cool place to explore.  One of the dads took it upon himself to prepare ahead of time and gave us a wonderful tour, involving the kids in imagining themselves in an ancient Greek city.  It was a sunny day, which was a blessing, as the air was a bit nippy, and rain was expected later in the day, so we managed to plan the tour at the perfect time.

The tour ended with a picnic lunch on the grass next to a ginormous temple built to Poseidon (Neptune), with Chaplain Arreguin leading the kids through some passages of Scripture about God's temple and how now, as believers, WE are the temple.  Very cool!

It took well over an hour and a half to get to the ruins, so it's not someplace we would pop in and out of as easily as we might like--so we were glad for the opportunity to set aside most of a day to visit.  We did hustle home, as our friend Salvatore came for his English lesson/play time with the boys, but we did delay our start time to give us adequate time for the tour.

All in all, the kids seemed to enjoy the excursion as much as we did!  Lucan was really dragging by the time it was over--it was a lot of walking for short little legs!  Ted had Zaden in the backpack, as the trails weren't exactly stroller friendly, and he was also relieved to be able to sit down and relax after it was all over.  A bonus of the long drive was that Ted and I were able to discuss ideas for this year's Commission study as we were driving to Paestum, the result of which was a working outline to send to the director.  Having a framework will make it so much easier when I finally am able to set aside some time to write!  And now I'm extra excited, having just spent the time praying over the ideas and finally putting some things on paper!