We're HERE!

Hi!  It's Kathy and I'm the first guest blogger for the trip.  According to Lori, everyone is required to take a day, so I'm getting mine out of the way:)  I'm also doing it because it is almost 10:00 and I'm wide awake!  Usually I'm winding down for the day, but the time change has thrown us all off a bit.  We have an annoying habit of waking up at 2 a.m. and not being able to go back to sleep without a little Tylenol p.m.
Everything has been going good, and today we started some serious "touring."  Because of the size of our group, we need to take two cars and are divided into two teams:  the boy team and the girl team.  Of course the girl team is better, but the boy team is doing an excellent job leading us to all the sites (thanks Demetris).  The streets in the towns are very narrow, and of course they drive on the "wrong"side.  I'm not quite as jumpy as the first day when I swore we were going to crash into cars head first because we were in the wrong lane!
We spent today in Larnaca, which is the southern part of Cyprus and about an hour from our beach villa.  It is also the city we flew in to, and is located right on the Mediterranean Sea.  We started at the Hala Sultan Tekke Mosque, which was founded in 647 A.D, by the aunt of the prophet Mohammed. She died in Cyprus during an Arab raid (fell off a mule).  Next we headed to Ayios Lazarus Church, but since it was lunch time it was closed for two hours!  We headed on to the old Larnaca Fort and out to a lunch (gyros) before heading back to the church.  The Church is named after Lazarus from the Bible.  You may remember that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.  After that, legend holds that he moved to Cyprus where he preached the gospel. His remains are said to have been found on the island and moved to the church, where they remain.  The church was beautiful, with many pictures of saints lining the walls.
Our final stop was at the Aqueducts that were originally built by the Romans, and rebuilt in 1745 by the Turks.  As Andrew commented, 1745 isn't very old for here!  It was used until the 1930's.  We then headed home for a swim in the villa pool and wine and pasta on the patio.

Cheers to Fed!

One other note, as tennis fans we could NOT miss Wimbledon.  Usually it's Breakfast at Wimbledon, but this year it was Beers at Wimbledon, since we watched in a bar starting at 4 in the afternoon.  Most of us (sans Kadi and all the British tourists around us) were thrilled to watch another Fed win!

Cats were sent to Cyprus many years ago to kill the snakes. You see stray cats everywhere.  We like to stop and make friends when we can.

We needed to be suitably dressed in the church, so had to wrap scarves around our shorts.

Aqueducts