Greek Island Trip

This was the last day of our trip. Unfortunately the entire day was spent traveling. We were picked up at the hotel at 3:30am in order to make our flight to Rome and then on to Chicago.

This was the first time either of us have visited Greece and we both loved it. Greece has a very warm Mediterranean climate with warm friendly people, good food, good wine, and plenty of tourist destinations. As far as language goes, almost everyone we interacted with spoke decent English and most signs were in both Greek and English.

Of the four destinations we visited, we both enjoyed Santorini the most. We liked the hotel in Crete the most, but found the area of Crete where we stayed to be rather quiet with few tourist attractions other than bars and restaurants. We would have liked to have explored the western part of Crete, especially the Samaria Gorge, but as it's about a four hour drive from where we were staying and unless we had made plans to stay the night, just getting to and from the gorge wouldn't have left much time to explore. Mykonos was very windy and other than spending time in Mykonos town or visiting Delos, there's not much to do other than lay on one of the many beaches. Athens is a very large, crowded, busy city. While there is plenty to see and do, especially with a history dating back over 3,400 years, it also suffers from the most extreme heat of the places we visited.

While Greece is considered a modern developed country with very high standards of living as well as the cradle of Western civilization, we found it not as modern as some of the other European countries. Plumbing in Greece is old and rather delicate. Therefore disposing of toilet paper is not allowed in toilets and must be disposed of in wastebaskets. Additionally tap water is not potable, but bottled water is plentiful and inexpensive, as long as you avoid the tourist traps. Wi-Fi is quite prevalent and is free in many locations, making it easy and cheep to check-in with friends and family back home. Food in Greece is delicious and healthy. It's the very definition of a Mediterranean diet with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, olive oil, and fish and every city has a wealth of good restaurants to choose from. Greece has a very warm sunny Mediterranean climate, so you should have good shoes that will keep your feet cool and dry and breathable clothing that provides good sun protection. Getting around Greece, depending on where you are, can be a little tricky. Everywhere we visited had a public transportation system, although some were more convenient than others. If you plan on renting a car you should get an international drivers license and keep in mind that the driving style in Greece is quite aggressive. GPS navigation is not terribly reliable as the maps are missing many of the smaller destinations and will sometimes steer you toward small gravel roads which are best avoided. If you know locations you would like to visit it's best to program them into your GPS and figure out the best route before you leave. For Android devices I found Maverick to be one of the better offline mapping applications. It allows you to cache maps in local memory and can import and export Google Earth KML files. While the lite version only allows a limited number of waypoints, you can either work around this by storing waypoints in separate files, or purchase the pro version for $5.