We promised ourselves a decent summer holiday this year, somewhere with plenty of sun, sea and good food. With the end of summer looming, we settled on Greece as our destination, and have had 10 fantastic sun filled days – even I managed to get something resembling a tan! Athens was the first stop on our trip, and we spent our first day on the ground seeing all the usual tourist sites, including the New Museum of the Acropolis, which is finally open, after many delays. Our first “Old Stuff” was, however, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and despite being only a group of 10 or so columns is in my mind one of the grander sites – the columns are just so huge, larger than those of the Parthenon I think.
We then meandered around past the Olympic Stadium (the one from the first modern olympics, not the 2004 one), around the bottom of and finally up to The Acropolis (of which we have a million pictures). This was quite cool, though the Parthenon is covered in scaffolding and has a crane inside it. And beside it. They do quite well to hide this from a distance, I thought. Some great views over the city, and down to the water at Pireaus. My favourite part was probably the Agora, which had the more complete Temple of Hephaestus, and plenty of ruins – enough, really, that we’d seen our fill. 
After this we headed to the port town of Pirreaus for the boat to Santorini, and to begin soaking up sun and soaking in the sea. Traveller tip for the day is to take either Hellenic Seaways or (preferably) Aegean Speed Lines – we found Blue Star much less comfortable on the leg we did, but that may have just been because it was an inter-island ferry. Also use Open Seas to plan your trip if you have internet access, it lists all the ferrys.
We hadn’t arranged anything ahead of time for the islands, which worked out fantastically in Santorini – we got very cheap accommodation near Perissa with a short walk to the beach, and a bar at the pool. We spent most of our time here relaxing, either at the beach or at the pool. It was nice to swim in the sea again, it had been over a year for us in Barcelona, and a year before that on the way over. We did a day with a car, and hit the lovely Red Beach in the south, visited Fira and wandered the streets with a million tourists, then joined them for a meal in Oia to watch a spectacular sunset.
We spent another day relaxing on Santorini, before shipping out to Naxos, a significantly larger island in the centre of the Cyclades. Again we didn’t bother arranging anything ahead – we simply walked into a tourist office and stated how much we were willing to pay, and got a fantastic apartment 2 minutes from the beach at Agios Prokopios. Travelling at the end of the season is great! We spent yet more time sitting by the beach/pool drinking and relaxing, and took a day out to drive (Thanks Sam!) through the mountainous centre of the island, stopping in a little town to wander the streets. We drove through to Apollonas at the north of the island for some great (and in my case, expensive) seafood, followed by a swim in the charming little bay. We also walked through the main town, which was pleasant enough, but the main attraction was definitely the ocean – it’s been long missed by all.
We returned to Athens for our last night in Greece, and went to a traditional Greek taverna in Thisio, one that specialised in Lamb Chops – you order by the Kilogram. We had 1.5 Kg between us, which was perfect, all were stuffed by the end, and almost needed to be rolled home. We sampled some of the local bars in Thisio, and found an area deviod of tourists, which was nice – strangely they were all at the glitzy bars at the other end of the street!
All in all it was a great trip, and I’m very glad that we had a chance to get some sun and sea to top off our northern summer – roll on winter now, for some snowboard and ski action in the alps!
We had a heap of fun with our new camera – over 400 we took I think! Some of them can be found here
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