A Walking History Tour of Athens

It is probably a hidden blessing that our trip is coming to an end, as we’ve eaten more than we ever have on vacation and have officially turned into oompa loompas.  It hasn’t helped that the food in general has actually been quite diverse and spectacular, so we just had to sample a little of…

Adventures of Greek Opie

We landed after a very short flight in Athens around 7:30pm, and took the metro about 40 minutes into town.  By this point, we’d already figured out the metro system anyways, which was pretty intuitive.  It was less intuitive when we got out at Monastiraki, as this was a very busy area with a ton…

Old Town Chania by Foot

While the first week of our honeymoon went by slowly (in a very good way), the second week flew by.  And just like that, we were leaving Crete already.  Since we had used Chania as a home base and took numerous day trips out to the coast and gorge, we wanted to use our last…

Elafonisi, Home of the Pink Beach

After a full day yesterday, we were a few paces slower today and took our time getting our show on the road.  While we were on the too-early end of breakfast yesterday, we nearly missed it entirely today.  But we dashed downstairs just in the nick of time and hit the road to Elafonisi by…

Hiking the Samaria Gorge

In addition to its idyllic beaches, one of the top attractions in Crete we were most looking forward to was the Samaria Gorge.  As the longest gorge in Europe at 10 miles, Samaria was listed as one of the must-do’s that ultimately influenced our decision to visit this island. Once again, we were faced with the…

Beach Day at Balos

Beach day!  With so many beautiful beaches on the island of Crete, we were eager to try out one of its legendary beaches in the northwest.  At the top of our list was Balos, a remote beach in the far northwest about 30 miles from Chania.  There were a few options for how to get there:…

Minotaurs and Other Myths

Today was going to be an action packed day as we were picking up our rental car, and making a number of pit stops en route to our final destination of Chania Town. We got up early to make the most out of the daylight hours we had available, and had quite a bit of…

Seriously, No One Has Donuts?

With high hopes to visit the ancient city of Thera, we took off by ATV this morning to check off the last handful of sites we wanted to see before heading out. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, it was a 45 minute hike just to get to the ancient site, and with only an hour available…

Chasing the Santorini Wine Trail

We started the day off without much of an agenda save for picking up a new ATV to explore the island with at our leisure.  That plan, however, almost fell to pieces when we called for a rental in the morning only to find that every one of the four rental companies in Oia was…

Four Wheeling Through Santorini

One of the activities highest on our list for Santorini was to rent an ATV and cruise around the island on our own.  Today, we jumped on the opportunity to explore the interior and southern coast of the island that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach. Not surprisingly, Doug did most of the…

Sailing and Sunsets in Santorini

One of the additional perks of our hotel was that they deliver made to order breakfasts to your room each morning.  Naturally, we wanted to try a little bit of everything, so we ordered a bread basket with fresh croissants and homemade bread, jams and butter, Greek yogurt with honey and fruit (somehow this tastes way…

The Search for the Perfect Gyro

A very bizarre and unexpected thing happened overnight.  When we were chilling on the balcony before going to bed last night, the lights down in Pollonia seemed to flash ever so slightly, but came right back on.  For a split second, it was pitch dark, but I thought I was just tired and my eyes…