Saturday, September 13, 2025

We were up early at 6 again, and had breakfast before disembarking. That all went rather smoothly, and we got a cab to the hotel. Delta put us up in a rather nice hotel (The Intercontinental), and got us a suite, which I never expected and was waiting to be told that a mistake had been made. We did have to wait a long time for the room to be ready, but Cheryl pushed them around 3pm and got us in. After unpacking and getting settled we went out to find dinner, and found a charming neighborhood restaurant about 5 minutes walk away. Then we scouted out another restaurant on the way back, which we will probably try tomorrow night. Cheryl has not been feeling well, so she went to bed early.

Sunday, September 14, 2025

We were again up early as we had an early morning tour of the Acropolis, about a 20 minute walk from the hotel. For me this was a bucket list item, to walk where Pericles and Socrates had walked. Unfortunately the temples there have suffered over the years. First were the Christians, who decided it was a good idea to destroy pagan statues. Then it was the Turks, who decided the Parthenon was a good place to store gunpowder, and the Venetians who fired the cannonballs that caused the explosion. And finally the British, in the person of Lord Elgin, who negotiated with the Turkish overlords to take a bunch of the best statues back to England, where they remain despite the efforts of Greece to get them back. But you still get some idea of the place used to be like from the remaining structures, and archeologists continue trying to find out more about the Acropolis and the Temples. Acropolis just means the high point of a city, and there are many acropolises in Greece, but when you say The Acropolis it means Athens.

The most famous temple is the Parthenon, erected in honor of Athena, the patron goddess of the city. It is a massive structure with interesting architectural features. The columns are all slightly tilted, which perhaps helped it to survive the earthquakes in the region. And it has no truly straight lines, everything is gently curved if you look closely. It housed a giant statue of Athena seated, and the statue was made of gold and ivory. Sadly it no longer exists, but gold statues have a way of being melted down. And since the gunpowder explosion it no longer has a roof. It would have been colorful, as indeed most of the statues would have. We see the statues as they look after a few thousand years, and they all appear to be white marble. But they would have been brightly painted originally. Also on the Acropolis is the Erechtheion, another temple dedicated to Athena. This has three sections, and one section has the Caryatids, which are columns made to look like attractive girls. Of course, the best one was taken away by Lord Elgin, but the remaining 5 are in the Museum, and the 6 you see on the temple now are reproductions. Then there is the temple of Athena Nike, which is dedicated to both goddesses. There are other structures here as well, such as the Odeon, a once enclosed theater, the Sanctuary of Asclepius, and the Theater of Dionysus Eleuthereus.

By the time we left the Acropolis the crowds were getting even larger, and we headed for the Acropolis Museum, just across the street, where we saw more of the artifacts that the archeologists have unearthed. Sadly, most of them are not intact after 2,000 years, but we enjoyed seeing a portion of what the museum held. But Cheryl was flagging so we made it back to the hotel where she went to bed after lunch. After she got up we went to dinner at the other place we checked out last night. Then we went to Lidl to pick up a few vegetables, and then back to the hotel, where Cheryl went to bed early.

Monday, September 15, 2025

Today is our 46th wedding anniversary! I think we may be doing something right. And celebrating it in Athens does sound like doing something right. After breakfast we headed for the Ancient Agora, which is at the foot of the Acropolis. But it turned out we had tickets for a certain admission time, and were rather early.  So we headed into the Monastiraki neighborhood adjacent to the Agora, which is full of shops. We first stopped for a bit in a park just to rest, because we are doing a lot of walking. Then we did some shopping for souvenirs of Athens, and stopped at a cafe for cold drinks. After killing enough time we went back and entered the Agora. The Agora was the heart of Athens. This is where Socrates would stop people and ask them questions. This is where the city government resided. This was the marketplace. And this is where the citizens would vote on important political issues of the day. Athens was a direct democracy, where issues were decided by a vote of the citizens, unlike the representative democracy that most democratic countries use today. Every free adult male citizen had a vote.

Cheryl found an audio guide from Rick Steves which we used. We started in the Stoa of Attalos, which was built by King Attalos II of Pergamon (in Asia Minor) in gratitude for the education he received in Athens. A stoa is a covered walkway or portico, and this one has been reconstructed, which you don’t often find here. And inside is the Museum of the Ancient Agora, which we of course toured. The objects displayed cover thousands of years, from the pre-history of the area through the Bronze Age (Mycenae, Troy) through the Classical (Pericles, Socrates), The Hellenistic (from the death of Alexander to the arrival of the Romans, and then the Roman period. So there was a lot of history here. Then the Middle Stoa, which is just rows of broken column stubs, the Great Drain, and the old Well in which you can see grooves worn over the years by ropes pulling up buckets full of water. Then we saw the base of the Tholos, which was a circular building that housed the government. The rest of the building is gone now, but the circular base remains, with a single broken column stub in the middle. Our last stop was the Temple of Hephaestus, which is a well preserved Temple, in part because it was converted to an Orthodox Church from the 7th century until 1834. Hephaestus was the god of metal working, craftsmanship, and fire, and archeologists have found a number of pottery workshops and metal-working shops in the area.

By this point Rick Steves was done, and so were we, so we walked back to the hotel to rest up before dinner and then packing up for our return flight to Detroit tomorrow. For dinner we decided to go back to the first place we ate at 2 nights ago.

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

We were up at 5:45am roday to allow time for breakfast before catching a cab to the airport. We got there early, as planned, and waited at the gate for our flight to JFK. The flight went as planned, and then we transfered to a flight to Detroit, getting back around 6pm Detroit time, which was 1am Athens time. And we had to pick up some food and have a quick dinner, so it was a very long day for us. We were up for about 20 hours.

Final Thoughts

Spending one or two days in a place hardly means you really get to know it, but life is finite and we saw a lot of things we might not have seen if we hadn’t taken this trip. For us, Santorini and Mykonos are stops we could easily have skipped in hindsight, but we didn’t know that before we went. We learned that Shore Excursions Group is a good value for excursions. They guarantee they will get you back to your ship, and we were on time or early on each one. But the hassle of getting Tender tickets to meet a tour on time is something I would skip. The Shore Excursions Group is a broker that contracts with local guides, and they always wanted us to get one of the first tenders, and that is not how cruise ships work. They always prioritize people on their own excursions, and the best we ever got by getting up early was to get on tender #6. If we do another cruise like this I will find out which ports are tender ports, and make sure to only book cruise line excursions there. However, we learned that you don’t have to wait until your tender is called, you can just head down early and see if they need a few people to fill the boat.

As we experenced on our flight to Venice, never, ever plan to arrive the day you embark. Many things can go wrong, and the ship will not wait. But getting extensions in Venice and Athens was absolutely the best thing to do. Still you need to know when to quit. On our last day in Athens I had booked entrance to a museum for after the Agora, and in the moment we just decided we were tired. So we didn’t go, which means we lost the Euros we spent on tickets, but it was the right decision. But overall, Venice and Athens were our two favorite parts of the whole trip.