Europe 2007 Part 3

Usually I list the resources we used to research and tour each city and I haven’t done that yet. We used Rick Steves’ guides for Italy and Istanbul. Istanbul was the first guide book Rick did not write himself and it is a bit different than the others. We also used the Lonely Planet for Istanbul and Greece. I also learned about a lot of great web sites that are helpful for cruisers. For picking a cruise you can’t do any better than cruisecritic.com in conjunction with tripadvisor. For port information the best site I found was portreviews.com. We used the directions from port review to figure out how to get into the city from the ports that are far away.

Day 9 - Athens

After the day at sea the four of us were ready to take on Athens. The ship actually docks in the port of Piraeus which is 45 minutes away from the central area in Athens. We took a taxi to the train and got off at the station next to the parliament building. At the station there was a display of ruins including graves that were discovered during the building of the metro. Discovered ruins of archeological significance were dotted all over town. It must really put a damper on new construction. We walked through the botanical gardens and over to Hadrian’s Arch then doubled back to catch the changing of the guard at the parliament building. This was as ceremonial as the one at Buckingham Palace. The traditional Greek military uniform is something else – wool tights, skirt, large pom-poms on the wooden shoes.

Next we followed the Lonely Planet walking tour through the city headed eventually towards the Acropolis. We saw several tiny churches that dated back to the beginnings of Christianity. These churches sat twenty people at the most, quite a contrast from the Blue Mosques and Aye Sofia a few days earlier. We worked our way up hill through some very traditional and modern neighborhoods thinking we were working towards the Acropolis. We hit a dead end right outside the Acropolis wall about ½ above the city and had to back track. In the end this was a good thing because we found a great little restaurant to have lunch at. What they do is have a prix fixe meal that included water and wine. Then they bring out a display platter of like 30 foods. Since there were 4 of us we got 10 choices and a Greek salad. We had fried sardines, fried calamari, calamari in tomato sauce, fava beans, meatballs and a lot of fried potatoes. It was great and we paid 8 Euro per person. After lunch we had the energy to make the 1.75 mile trek straight up hill to the Acropolis.



This was by far the hottest day of the trip and by this time it was 1 in the afternoon. There is no shade at the Acropolis and you must move very carefully because you are walking on marble steps most of the way up. Everyone talks about the Parthenon but the Erechtheum was much more impressive to me. One side of this building is held up by statues of six ladies known as the Ladies of the Porch.

Day 10 – Katakolon Greece




This Greek island is a cruise stop only because the site of the first Olympics (ancient not modern) is here. The site it self is just stumps of columns as there has been no restoration. Also the fires this summer went right up to the edge of the Olympic ruins so we skipped this site.

Instead we spent the day in the port town. Shon rented a scooter and rode around the island. I spent the day shopping for knick-knacks with Chameko and Tracy followed by a relaxing lunch on the waters edge. At this point in the trip this low key day was just what we all needed. Katakolon is a pretty little town and we thought the shopping was as good as or better than Rhodes or Athens.

Day 11 - At Sea



This day we had some excitement at sea. We passed the volcanic island of Stromboli on our way back to Italy. It is active as shown in the photograph.