Greece is the Word

Greek flag flying over the Peloponnese

Yeah, I said it (with apologies to a certain blockbuster musical). And while we were in Greece a few years back, we said it just about every day.

The reason?  This presently beleaguered country, which I can only hope won’t be abandoned by travelers it in its time of economic need, has everything you both could want in the romantic and educational journey of a lifetime.

Ancient history, turquoise seas as warm as a bathtub, quiet islands, delicious food…truly, Greece had me at hello.

In 2005, Adam was able to put aside a near-astounding two whole weeks for a trip to Greece. Inspired by our love of Greek food and curiosity about the Big Bang of white-people culture, we were eager to see as much of the country as possible.

As I trip-planned in early ’05, outside of a Frommer’s guide, news about the 2004 Olympics and a few articles about far-flung islands, I was having a hard time finding travel info on Greece; Globe Trekker, Anthony Bourdain and Samantha Brown had yet to explore the country with cameras (though we’d later spot Brown in person while tooling around the cobbled lanes of Santorini). Scouring the web, I was happy to find Matt Barrett’s Greece Travel Guide: This American-born Grecophile’s on-the-ground advice encouraged me to plan an amazing vacation full of city, mountain, beach, island and ancient-site exploring.

May, with its cool breezes and wildflowers, would have been our first-choice month to travel, but we’d already committed to Montana that June. So, we picked the tail end of August through mid-September to celebrate the start of the Fall shoulder season. It was sunny, often hot and pretty dry, which reminded us of the summer landscape in Malibu, California, but with bigger mountains and many more churches.

The white-marble interior of Naxos, Cyclades Islands

We flew from LAX to Athens on Lufthansa, with a brief stop in London’s Heathrow. We departed on Monday, August 29th, the infamous day that Hurricane Katrina hit America’s Gulf Coast, causing severe destruction in Louisiana and Mississippi. It felt devastating to be leaving the U.S. in a time of crisis, and we’d nervously check in with BBC every morning and night…hence learning more about New Orleans’ plight than we might have if we’d stayed home. Almost everywhere we went, people extended their sorrow to us for such bad American news.

We’d soon learn by talking to locals that Greece had been hit with a storm of its own; the 2004 Olympics had swept through the coffers of the already financially-strained country, and there was little money left for schools, roads law enforcement and more. The presently dire economic report for Greece has been a long while in the making, and though it makes me uncomfortable to even think it, will surely create some advantageous travel deals.

Here’s a sketch of our two weeks in Greece:

We spent two nights and one full day in Athens, prowling the Acropolis and the Agora, wandering through the National Gardens, and getting happily lost on side streets. We loved the 19th century (and unfortunately, most-touristed) part of town known as the Plaka; here we found a good rate at the unnecessarily fancy, beautifully located Electra Palace Hotel Athens (rack rate for a standard double, about $210 EUR per night), dined in the shadow of the Parthenon at the romantic Daphne’s, and trekked up a long hill to reach Eden, a wonderful vegetarian restaurant.

The Acropolis and Plaka in Athens

The morning of our second full day, our reserved rental car from a local company called Swift was delivered to us at the Electra Palace (5 days’ rental of a car classified as “small,”about $150 EUR). We white-knuckled it out of town — Athens traffic, with few clear street signs, suicidal scooter riders and free-form taxi drivers, is not for the faint-hearted — bound west for a five-day driving trip in the mainland Peloponnese. We saw the canal at Corinth, the ruins of Mycenae, Mystras, Olympia and more; the seaside towns of Napflio, Gythio and Pylos; and a lot of mountains, goats, olive trees and tabepnas in-between.

We returned to Athens for just one night, and were picked up the next morning for a 7-day “yacht” cruise through the Cyclades Islands. I use yacht in air quotes because 1) our homey but slightly shabby craft hadn’t been rehabbed since about 1982, 2) our tiny cabin with two twin beds often smelled like a mix of seaweed and industrial cleaner, and 3) there were about 20 other people on the boat with us, most of whom were pretty darn lovely. This was no schmancy voyage, but rather a compromise between limited vacation time and a desire for Greek Island exploration. While we were able to skip often-endless ferries, we didn’t get to stay as long as we’d have liked on any of the big ticket islands (e.g., Mykonos, Santorini, etc.). As an introductory sampler platter of islands, though, it was never boring and often extremely romantic.

Posts to come on all three parts of our trip — stay tuned.

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See also

8 Surprises in Athens
Dreaming of the Peloponnese
Safe by the Sea in Napflio
It’s Always the Quiet Ones
Turkeys…in Greece
TWT Travel Binder: Greece