Driving through Hades

We had so much fun with our tour of the rivers, and lunch beside the formidable River Acheron (woe) that we could not resist driving through the Elysian Fields, the Plains of Asphodel, by Lake Acherusa, or Mt. Sisyphos--at 50kph.  Because, as it turns out, these places don't exist in the forms they did over 2000 years ago.  The fields and plains were just that--fields of olive trees and plains of sheep pastures.  The mount was utterly unidentifiable as one of a hundred potentially steep slopes that we had driven by or through.  And the lake, even in antiquity, got its designation because it would appear and disappear as the River Acherusia overflowed its banks.  Now that the river has been dredged and damed, it doesn't overflow anymore, and the fields and plains are able to regulate their usage.

However, you could easily see how finding these vast plains and field as this high elevation, shrouded in early morning fog could lend themselves to being the places where the spirits of the dead waited, and a body of water could come and go from the underworld.