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The Greek islands are awesome, I'd come back here for sure. Considering Andrea and I planned going to Greek islands like 5 years ago based on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie, it was a little different than expected. First of all, it's not all little white towns on hills. Second, you can't ride the donkey sideways, so bad day for skirts and dresses. Third, you can't just jump on a hot Greek guy's little boat to hop to the next island, it's actually a pretty serious ferry ride. Besides these few setbacks, I loved Greece. There were pretty little white towns, cool towns on hills with amazing views, and we did ride donkeys up the cliff.
We went to Paros, Santorini, and Crete. Paros was the prettiest I thought, the prettiest town, harbor, beaches, and hotel, and very nice people. Each place we've stayed so far has been run by an older couple, and each with a son that they introduce us to for anything we need to communicate about in English. In Paros, the older man was so excited to introduce us to his "young and strong" son Manolis, who was so hungover the day we checked out that he could hardly lift his hand off the desk enough to hand back my passport.
When we arrived next in Santorini we tried to make it from the port to our hotel across the island by ourselves. We ended up lost and had someone call our hotel and the man in his tiny van came and picked us up, asking why we ever tried to get there on our own. Our hotel was in the middle of nowhere along side the airport runway, and the man said to get anywhere we'd need him to give us a ride. So we ended up renting an ATV for four days, which was a lottt of fun, and besides having to kickstart it every morning, it got us all around the whole island.
Our travel days have been pretty eventful so far. When Andrea and I try to accomplish anything together, somehow the simplest things become really difficult. We bounce stupid idea after stupid idea off each other until we come up with the most opposite plan of what common sense would tell us, and then go at that with 100% confidence.
In the huge Athens port, the guy who sold us our tickets said we should take the shuttle to our dock because it's a long way, but we decided to walk since we had 6 hours until our boat. It took us about 4 hours and two coffee breaks to walk there. We almost walked up a freeway onramp, got lost in a trucking load zone, waited in the wrong place for 2 hours thinking our boat was late, then had to sprint onboard, almost missing our boat that had been sitting there for hours.
Leaving Paros, we started in the tiny port where we bought our tickets and were absolutely positive our boat there had arrived at a different place down the coast. We walked out of the port saying "Good thing we don't have to wait here, it's so busy with all these boats arriving," and then realized we were obviously totally wrong and had to walk all the way back.
Maybe our worst travel day though was from Santorini to Crete, but in our defense I don't think we could have made it any better. We knew this smaller ferry was going to be rough when they handed out motionsickness bags as soon as you sat down. The ride was almost 3 hours, mostly complete chaos. The ferry employees couldn't even stand in the cafe kitchen area because everything was crashing out of the fridge, glasses were shattering all over the floor, people were vomiting and falling down right and left, they asked for all doctors on board within the first twenty minutes... If I thought I'd be able to open my eyes without throwing up, there was quite a scene to watch, but I was staying focused. To add to the stress, we had to catch a bus leaving at 9 for a town three hours from the port, and our ferry docked late at 8:45. After a heated argument with a taxi driver, we made it on the bus a minute before it left.
So we made it to Crete, which is much different than the smaller islands. They describe it as stuck between East and West, which seems very accurate, although we've never been anywhere East of here.
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