We had planned to head up to Parga today, but the weather was extraordinary blustery and I haven’t been feeling great, so we decided to take a more local drive and see what we could see from the mainland.
(it was unlikely that I was going to get any good drone footage either way)
We drove across the bridge and down to Plagia, which has a castle up on a hill which we will go back and explore later, as well as a very small beach that points back towards the island. Most importantly, it’s home to some wild hogs that I absolutely must just put the video up here:
(they just tore that yard up, although I suspect the area is mostly abandoned)
Leaving Plagia, we ran into some skinny roads and abandoned ruins that looked pretty familiar — we had driven through them the very first day when we had gotten put off on tiny roads because the main road from the highway to Lefkada was closed (or backed up) for construction. This is “Old Plagia,” a village of old stone buildings that the internet claims was finally completely abandoned in the 60s after an earthquake, but still showed some minor signs of life — water storage tanks, along with a couple old guys and a pickup truck. Population: 2. Another instance where there more cows than people. (Yeah, at least seven or eight.) The town has two churches and a fountain that are abandoned but still intact, and that might make for a future exploration as well.
We continued down the coast to Palairos which looked to have a nice little seaside village along the Med, with a nice little marina (and maybe an Indian restaurant), and then to Mytikas, before turning back towards home and a cozy dinner as the wind continued to shake the trees.
It is nice to see more of the local landscapes, and the road all the way down snaked along the coast, looking out to Lefkada and some of the other nearby islands like Meganisi and Scorpios (the Onassis island).
Took another tour around downtown Lefkada Town today, taking pictures down hidden alleys and meeting some more of the town’s feline citizens.
Cat count: 40? 50? They were around every corner. Encountered one gang running behind a woman and her dog; another gang (with some younger cats who stared holes into me); singletons here and there (including at least one older cat who clearly had won more fights than Mike Tyson, and showed it); a pair of kittens curled up on a chair; a whole herd inside some covered patio space; one confrontational orange and white guy protecting his turf. And everywhere there were little signs that the townspeople want to ensure their well being — a bowl with some fish bones here, a covered cardboard box there.
In fact, there are cats in two of those pictures, and you didn’t even see them.
Grabbed lunch at To Monastiri, our normal souvlaki place, after it appeared most of the options in the walkplatz were closed, whether because it’s weird hours or because it’s not tourist season. Had a very large beer with my pita, and enjoyed watching a couple of kids play keepaway with grandpa without a care in the world. We both commented how similar it was to our childhoods, playing without nervous adult supervision. Stark difference to how we perceive parenting now in America.
Finished out the daylight hours by driving out to Agios Nikitas and looking at the Ionian Sea a little, then looping back through Lefkada and finding a road out to the — breakwater? It’s not a peninsula since it connects back around to the town by the bridge, but it’s definitely on the north side of the harbor. It has a few old windmills and a couple of beach spots that look abandoned, but I wonder what it all looks like during the summer, if the road is lined with cars and the rocky beach is covered with sunbathers. We’ll go back and explore more when we have more time.
Oh, and the tacos last night were a mixed bag. Taco shells were stale (so exactly like every kit I bought in the US), seasoning was good (and we had leftovers so we had nachos tonight), milk cream is NOT sour cream, but I was able to make a reasonable facsimile by combining some with some Greek yogurt. I doubt we’ll be springing for another box any time soon, but we probably won’t be deterred from buying some tortillas and trying to figure out a filling ourselves some time in the future.
At some point in time this morning, we heard a car horn honking its way up the rough access road that winds up to the cottage. We didn’t see anyone so we assumed they stopped up at the plot above us — it looks kinda like a vegetable garden and is cordoned off with fencing. We suspected it was possible that Loaf had gotten herself trapped in there before the storms hit a couple weeks back, and no one had been up since then to let her out.
Whether that is actually the root cause or it was just coincidence, when we pulled ourselves together to run into town, there she was, looking for attention (and treats). Happy reunion between cat and Heather ensued.
Feeling a little nostalgic for American food, I picked up a box (!) of hard-shell tortillas complete with taco seasoning, along with the requisite fixings. Sour cream was a little tricky to find until I translated it back and forth and realized they call it “milk cream” here — krema galaktos — or at least I think it’s sour cream.
I guess if I end up with actual cream for my tacos, I can always try greek yogurt instead.
Results tomorrow.
Picked up souvlaki for a late lunch, and coming back up to the car I saw that the bakery we like still had melomakaronas from Christmas, although the supply looked pretty low. I ducked in to grab one last chance for a handful (as they are quite good and quite addictive) and after I ordered some, I confirmed that this really was the last of the last of them, that they wouldn’t make any more this year, and did I just want the rest of them?
Yeah, yeah I did.
They threw in the rest of the chocolate covered ones in as a freebie. They probably enjoy having a chubby American as a regular customer. Now I just gotta figure out what else I want to try!
Objective this morning is to pick up the new rental car, head to Delphi, and then continue back to Lefkada. A good start means we can drive all the way back in daylight!
Yeah that didn’t happen.
We ended up stopping back at Dope Coffee and taking our sweet time to enjoy coffee and pastries before jumping on the train and heading out to the airport. Simple enough process to get the new car (which is bright blue this time rather than a boring sensible white) and, while we were a little behind our timetable, we still felt confident we could get back in daylight.
We took the ring road around Athens to get on the other side before hopping off and onto normal roads to head towards Delphi, even though we didn’t think we’d have time now to stop and enjoy Delphi before they closed up shop. Stopped in Itea and grabbed souvlaki for a late lunch, a little coffee, but we couldn’t even make it to Patras before the sun set. It made for some treacherous driving in the tiny curvy roads leading in to Patras, especially once it started to rain.
The good news was we had leftovers in the fridge for a late dinner once we got back to the house. A great weekend and a nice intro to yet another European city I would love to spend a lot of time in.
Day two in Athens started slow. Dogs were barkin’ a little bit, and a lazy lie-in was made easier by the view from bed. Probably also needed a little extra rest after the bubble party upstairs lasted well into the night. I went down and grabbed peinirli from the little restaurant right below the hotel, and we ate lunch in bed.
Even with a late start, we decided to head out to Plaka to do a little sightseeing / photo-taking. We meandered around and found one of the famous “staircases full of taverna tables” and after a little bit of a sales pitch from one of the purveyors, we decided a snack and a beer sounded like a good idea, and took up a table right by the main road through Plaka.
One large beer and half-liter of wine (and about two hours) later, we headed back up the steps towards Anafiotika, another neighborhood above Plaka that also has very picturesque white-and-blue houses and — let’s say unusual — staircases that wind up and around the little houses, turning into little alleys and deadends and finally coming out right at the stone of the Acropolis hill under the Greek flag platform.
Feeling like another little break, we grabbed a seat on the stones at the very top of Anafiotika, where you get a great view back across the city towards Lycabettus Hill. We made a new little friend who identified us as cat people and was happy to pose for pictures with the scenery.
Back down the hill and back to the hotel for a break, and then back for more loukoumades and Asian food from our little street food street, before heading back to the hotel to put our feet up and enjoy the last little bits of our view before heading back to the island tomorrow.
A slow start to the morning, enjoying the view out the hotel room window directly to the Acropolis. Springing the extra cash for Acropolis-view is great when the hotel room is only eighty bucks, but on the third floor it’s a little obstructed by a neighboring building, so last night we asked about moving higher up the building. The receptionist asked us to check back in the morning, and when I did on our way out, they were able to get us into the fifth floor, so we took a few minutes to gather our belongings, stashed the suitcase in the hotel office, and stepped up the street to grab coffee while they cleaned our new room.
(I appreciate the hospitality, the effort to please us, and will highly recommend this hotel to anyone visiting Athens, and will remember this for any future stays!)
After acquiring coffee (and a cardamom bun, yay fika) up the street at Dope Coffee Roasting and then moving our things into our new higher room, we were finally fortified to make the climb up the Acropolis. I think like probably any tourist in Athens, the Acropolis was priority number one for our time here, and we chose to do it today because the sky was supposed to be cloudy and the temperature was supposed to be low, thus hopefully keeping other tourists to a minimum.
(we were right)
First thought: the climb is gonna be hard for me, an out of shape non-hiker who hasn’t even reaped the normal benefit of being in Europe, which is having to walk everywhere and thereby at least getting a little ready for it.
Second thought at the top: It’s not as hard as you think. Thankfully.
As we had hoped, the walk up the hill and the ticket office itself were pretty much devoid of other people. There was no line for tickets, and while there were some Instagram influencer wannabes taking advantage of the sparse crowds to get as many sexy-posed pictures as their poor boyfriends could muster.
The Parthenon itself is majestic. Even if you only take it as the most recognizable example of the art, architecture, philosophy, sculpture, literature, science, and medicine of the ancient world, hell, I don’t know, that sounds actually like a lot to think about. It’s awesome. It should be inspirational. It might be overwhelming. It makes you feel a little … underperformative. This is what humanity could do with basic tools and inspiration. Best I can do is make lasagna.
(I mean it’s good lasagna but still.)
I didn’t take many photos but I did take a solid amount of video. I will let the muses flow through me and edit them together and hopefully do some of it justice.
The temple of Athena Nike and the gate into the Acropolis is spectacular too. The third building, the Erechtheion, is small but includes a portico supported by caryatids, sculpted in amazing detail. We spent around four hours on top of the mountain, talking, walking and stopping, taking pictures and video, just … absorbing it.
With my phone dead and H’s close, we came back down the hill, grabbed some sustenance at an Asian noodle place around the corner, and then took a break in the room, charging our phones and watching the sun set on the Acropolis. We finished out the night resting our feet, then grabbed a late dinner of Italian pasta and gelato.
One thing we did not consider when we requested a change up to the fifth floor was the proximity to the sixth floor, where late tonight some sort of “bubble party” was taking place. Not quite Mexico City Easter, but we felt a bit of thumping late into the night. Totally worth it.
Took today off work to head back to Athens and have a four-day weekend being a tourist. We also decided to swap out the rental car since our first month was up today, and the brakes really needed to be fixed. The plan was to get up early, drive back roads towards Athens until we needed to get on the highway to get to the airport, and then take the metro into Athens and pick up a new car on Monday.
And yet, despite that, we still stayed up way too late last night and got a later start than we wanted.
With the suitcase already packed and loaded, though, we made a quick exit, stopped in town to get coffee and a tiropita from the corner bakery, and got on the road!
(I didn’t take a picture of the tiropita but I’ll still put a language block …)
tiropita | τιροπιτα | cheese pie
I like a savory breakfast. I like a handheld breakfast. I don’t think you should regularly give me a big square slice of a giant pie made of a dozen layers of crispy phyllo dough stuffed with some sort of tangy fresh cheese, with all its potentially crumbly shards of broken-off phyllo, especially while I’m driving, but in this case, I was pretty proud of myself, as I was able to order the tiropita, answer the question with the correct yes/no answer (which is a trick in itself), and would have gotten out without outing myself as non-lingual if I could have just given her a second two-euro coin and not looked at her stupified when she wanted more than two euro for the slice. (It was €2.20, let’s not get crazy, it’s still Greece.)
(I was less proud of the eating but I managed to get most of it in my mouth.)
The route we took headed off the island towards Patras, a large town on the Gulf of Corinth that we came through on Day One, then skirted the gulf on a curvy route towards Delphi before heading overland towards Athens.
Patras is a choke point that you pretty much have to go through if you’re going east-west in Greece, since it has really the only crossing point across that gulf — a good-sized bridge that crosses the nearest land gap. You get some pretty spectacular views (and the town and the gulf) as you come down the mountains towards the city.
On the other side of town, we stopped at what we thought was a truck stop, mostly because of my tiny bladder, but we also took the opportunity to get some food before continuing our trip. The truck stop had a bakery with sandwiches and a grill with all manner of cooked foods — souvlaki, sausages, meatballs, a bunch of options, and appeared to be ready for a mountain of luncheoners to descend on what was (at the time) a completely empty cafe. I mean — stacks of skewers, some cooked, some still raw, but enough to feed a good sized office building, which was not immediately evident nearby. I got a souvlaki stick and a sausage, some fries and some beverages, and we snacked in the car, and while we sat there, a giant bus pulled up and let thirty people off who all headed into the truck stop! And then a second showed up just as we were getting ready to leave! So — at least now we knew how the lunch crowd was showing up — but we still have no idea why they were being delivered to this particular truck stop, or what the passengers were doing on the bus in the first place.
(We learned later that some bus tours from Athens do include a stop like this for lunch, but we still don’t have any idea what sort of tourists would be doing this in January, or even what tourist destination exists on that western coast of Greece.)
Renourished, we got back on the road, taking the path along the northern coastline of the gulf before arriving in Itea and deciding to postpone a planned stop in Delphi since we wanted to try and get to Athens while it was still light out. Dropped the car at the airport without any fanfare, and hopped on the metro train back into the city right at rush hour. Doh.
The stop for the hotel was Monastiraki, and the metro entrance dumps you directly into Monastiraki Square and Hadrian’s Library, which is quite the introduction to the ruins and ancient architecture that provide the city with most of the tourist attractions. The Library pulled H’s attention for a while, and then we crossed the square and checked into the hotel and dropped our bag before heading back out to find dinner.
The area around Monastiraki is full of tavernas offering Greek specialties to the tourists who pass through heading to or from the Acropolis, but there’s also a number of side streets with all manner of food offerings — Italian, Asian, hamburgers (!) — but after some miscommunication we ended up getting Greek fast food anyways, which was acceptable but not spectacular. Dessert, however, was spectacular — loukoumades, which are little fried balls of dough covered in honey or chocolate or some other sauce.
loukoumades | λουκουμαδεσ | tasty fried balls of dough
We decided to get the “traditional” toppings of honey and cinnamon for our first attempt, and quickly decided there was no reason to try any of the froofy “modern” toppings, as the honey was the perfect sweet touch to the warm little doughnuts.
Big plans for tomorrow — take advantage of the colder weather and head up the Acropolis and hope the clouds and temps deter whatever other tourists are in the city.
We were wanting to explore the island a little more, and H had found a beach with picturesque cliffs down by the lighthouse that she wanted to check out, so I jumped at the chance to put my feet in the sand and the Mediterranean, and we headed down to the southern end of the island.
We pulled into the parking lot and the place was, as you might expect, completely empty. Well, almost completely empty — as we parked the car and got out, we heard … meowing?
Coming from the tree we had just parked under.
A little investigation revealed a young kitty peeking out from the branches, looking maybe a little stuck, but definitely wanting some attention. I felt it was unlikely I was going to be able to help it out if it was indeed stuck, so rather than risk a couple bites and scratches, we turned around to get our bearings and take some pictures — and found our little feline friend plopping up behind us, trying to get in pictures and overall be friendly.
She followed us down to the stairs, where H was more interested in taking her picture rather than the surroundings. She followed us down the stairs, across the beach, and when we sat down to enjoy the lapping waters, she climbed in H’s lap, then mine, then on my shoulder like a parrot, then back into H’s lap where she snuggled up contentedly.
We named her Olive.
The beach is pretty stunning. I took a good amount of video, including some fun drone shots, which I’ll piece into a video and put in this post at a later date.
The beach is also not sandy in any way, shape, or form — it’s all pebbles, rocks, then smaller pebbles, even when you get up to the water. H later said that she read it was recommended to rent or buy some water shoes for these beaches, so she knew all along this was going to be painful on my poor tender feet.
I still put my feet in the water a little. Cool but not cold. Definitely could have had a little swim.
Olive followed us back to the stairs, back up to the car, and I really thought I was going to have a tough time convincing H that we couldn’t bring her back to the cottage. Olive, thankfully, escorted us to the car and then found something else to occupy her, letting us leave without any tearful goodbyes.
I do hope, however, if we go back down there, we get another little snuggle.
Grabbed some souvlaki from our local joint in town on the way back to the cottage, and found more melomakaronas in the bakery, so another dozen made their way back with us.
Quiet days this week. We’ve settled into a rhythm — wake up around 10, lounge around a little and eat some breakfast, head into town to gather supplies where needed. Zimis for a peinirli here, souvlaki there. Coffee Island to fill in.
We both think we’d like to get up earlier, and maybe we’ll start setting an alarm, but there’s also a part of me that’s just chalking this up to “island life” and going with the flow. It’s not like there’d be a lot to do in town if I was up at 6 in the morning.
(but on the flip side, I do need to set an alarm tonight to make sure we see the fish thing tomorrow)
Thursday we did go out to the ocean side of the island on the way back home, and the water was looking particularly blue.
Quiet day on the island. The second also appears to be a holiday, so the stores are still closed. They certainly looked open, but a quick attempt to go into the store yielded no automatic door opening and a very distinct impression that every person in there was elbow deep in a shelf — probably some start-of-year inventory or something. We ended up resorting to getting supplies from the gas station, which worked out ok because the gas stations here sell spaghetti, eggs, parmesan cheese, bread, pretty much a full grocery store packed into three rows in a service station. Had quite the selection of gourmet mayonnaises as well.
Cat count: 3 (Loaf, who still is lounging around the front patio despite us running out of snacks a week ago; the judging grey and white cat by what I know now is not the town square but just a little fountain area; and the swole orange cat. Gonna need to name them eventually since they’re recurring characters now.)
