A magical Mediterranean vacation COMPLETED - Page 23 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
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Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
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To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
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Gorgeous sunrise! I especially like your photos with the sun peeking through the grid work of the building. But such a rundown look to the port of Athens -- too bad.
Just have to set the record straight so that Athens doesn't sound like an ugly city.... the port is not part of Athens. It's a town called Piraeus, which is the closest harbor to the city of Athens. Piraeus is not a pretty place. Athens is a very interesting and NOT ugly city! It's unfortunate that Piraeus is the first glimpse of Greece that many people get. Even the airport is there, so unless you take the ferry over from Italy (which I highly recommend) or drive overland through the Balkans, you're stuck with seeing Piraeus first.
Just have to set the record straight so that Athens doesn't sound like an ugly city.... the port is not part of Athens. It's a town called Piraeus, which is the closest harbor to the city of Athens. Piraeus is not a pretty place. Athens is a very interesting and NOT ugly city! It's unfortunate that Piraeus is the first glimpse of Greece that many people get. Even the airport is there, so unless you take the ferry over from Italy (which I highly recommend) or drive overland through the Balkans, you're stuck with seeing Piraeus first.
Oh don't worry - hopefully the beauty of Athens will come across from my photos over the next few instalments.
Tuesday 8 July – part two: I didn’t expect this to be so popular!
At 8:15am, just as I was saying that we hadn’t yet had the “all ashore” call from Brent, you know what’s coming next… Sure enough, there he was telling us we could go ashore. We were pretty much all ready to go, but thankfully Mark reminded me that I was going to call Senses Spa to book their Spa Topia that they had advertised in today’s Navigator. Finally, they were doing a deal. It lasts 70 minutes and includes a massage and facial for $135. I think I managed to book it for 3:30pm. I say that, as the woman I spoke to didn’t exactly give me much confidence, shall we say?
With that done, we headed down to Fathoms for our Athens on your own tour. I was impressed to find this waiting…
Now I figured this would be one of the least popular ones, but how wrong can you be? It turned out that I think we had the biggest number of people on ours, compared to all the rest. Who knew? Then again, if you wanted to visit the Acropolis and the museum which were my main aims for the day, it was about $200 with lunch and yet this tour was only $29 and the admission to the Acropolis and the museum was only €17 ($23), so I guess in some ways, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.
We headed out and my first impression of the port was that it was very much like an airport with luggage carousels. As you walk through it, I felt that was a very apt description, as it had duty free shops, then passport control and security. I guess if you have a lot of ferries docking here, you must need airport type controls here.
Once outside, we realised just how hot it was already, and it was only 8:40am. Ugh! Still at least we’d be back on the bus by 2:30pm, so hopefully we could do most of our touring before it got too hot…. Fingers crossed!
I was very impressed with our guide on the way over to Athens. Bearing in mind this was a do it on your own tour, she did a great job of explaining about areas we were passing through. Pireaus, she told us, was the third biggest city in Greece, a bit different to what we were told yesterday, but I guess yesterday our guide was counting it as part of Athens, as today’s guide told us it’s home to 900,000 people and Athens to four million, whereas yesterday he’d said Athens is home to five million people. We passed by the other two ports in Pireaus, both of which looked much nicer than ours…
It was weird to see this, as we have this bank at home…
We saw beaches and were amazed by how many people were already in the sea, given it was a weekday and I would’ve thought people were at work or school, but who knows… maybe they were all visitors?
Soon we started to see Athens sprawling in front of us and it just goes on for miles and miles and miles. Our guide, who was much easier to understand than yesterday’s one thankfully, told us that Athens really started to grow again in the 19th century, after they defeated the Turks and Greece became one country. She also explained that there was another explosion of people coming here in the 1960s when people came looking for work.
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Catching back up.
Olympia looks so interesting.
I have only done Palo dinner once, but I won't be running back to it anytime soon.
The sunrise is just gorgeous...and I know it was probably 10 times better than the pictures are leading us to believe too.
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What a steal for the tour price! I wonder if they'll increase that price next summer, given the popularity.
I had no idea Athens had that many people! The things I learn from your vacations. I mean, holidays.
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I especially like your photos with the sun peeking through the grid work of the building. But such a rundown look to the port of Athens -- too bad.
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Then again, if you wanted to visit the Acropolis and the museum which were my main aims for the day, it was about $200 with lunch and yet this tour was only $29 and the admission to the Acropolis and the museum was only €17 ($23), so I guess in some ways, it’s a bit of a no-brainer. 
Still at least we’d be back on the bus by 2:30pm, so hopefully we could do most of our touring before it got too hot…. Fingers crossed! 
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