Dobleve

We spent a few weeks in Greece at the end of October with our friends Craig, Toby and Shannon; we had a fantastic time, I’d recommend Greece to anyone. I’d also recommend traveling anywhere with Toby, Shannon and Craig so if you’re looking for travel companions see what they’re doing.

We started our trip in Athens, a bit skeptical because we’d read and heard from some friends that Athens is dirty and not nice. We didn’t have that experience at all, we found Athens to be beautiful and spent lots of time walking and exploring the city. Time of year (late September is not hot like the summer) and where we stayed probably made the difference between our experience and a bad one. By luck we found some wonderful apartments to stay in while searching for live music to see in Athens prior to our trip. Beyond the Acropolis is a website run by Carol, who not only loves live music but also has several very nice apartments in Athens that she rents, I think we ended up staying in all of them on our trip, we passed through Athens several times as we moved around.

From Athens we took a day trip to Delfi, where the infamous Oracle is from. It takes about an hour and a half by car from Athens and is worth the drive; the site itself is beautiful as is the drive through the countryside to get there. We stopped in Arachova, close to Delfi and a great place to find lunch on the way. It’s a mountain town very close to a ski resort, great scenery and food. We ate at το Αρχοντικό and it was the best meal we had in mainland Greece.

We spent 3 days on the island of Santorini in the southern Cyclades. Santorini is a volcanic island that erupted thousands of years ago, blowing the island apart and leaving the caldera of the volcano as part of the Mediterranean and one large island and several small ones, all with spectacular steep cliffs facing into the caldera. We stayed in the town of Oia in the Chelidonia villas, we loved the apartment as well as the owner Rose. While beautiful, Santorini is somewhat overrun with tourists so it takes some work to find good places to eat and some peace and quiet. Each day cruise ships arrive in the main city of Thira and get bussed to the smaller towns on the island like Oia; the result is at times Oia is peaceful and wonderful and then for an hour its narrow streets will be jammed with hundreds of tourists dropped off from busses. We struggled to find good places to eat and eventually discovered Roka which we liked so much we went there twice.

From Santorini we went back to Athens for a day. We went to the house of a friend, Aristidis, who made us a wonderful lunch of octopus and pasta and showed us around his hometown Pireaus, the port city of Athens. You never know what you might find on the streets if you wander around enough.

The next day we took a ferry to Aegina to meet our sailboat captain for a week of sailing in the Cyclades. We chartered a boat with Mystic Blue, an eco sailing outfit. We could not have been happier with the captain and hostess and the trip itself. We sailed to a new island each day, had a beach BBQ, dinner with the Captain’s parents and lunch at his mother’s house and many more adventures that made the trip wonderful.