September 12th – Athens, Greece

Today was the first of many early port days, so I woke up to my alarm at 6:15am, got dressed, and ate breakfast up on Lido with a beautiful sunrise as my backdrop. 

We were originally supposed to be able to get off the ship starting at 7am, but it was delayed until 7:45am. Luckily, that didn’t impact us much because we were already planning to meet our tour group at 7:45 in the lobby anyway. Once all 12 of us were together, we went down to deck 0 and met our tour guide Kaliope (Kali for short) in the cruise terminal. There’s always something reassuring when you first see that sign with your group’s name and knowing that the guide you booked privately actually showed up haha Kali spoke perfect English and was an excellent guide. She went with us into every attraction, while our driver Nicos stayed with the van so he could drop of off and pick us up at the front entrance to each site.

We loaded up into the van and drove directly to the Acropolis in an attempt to beat the crowds, as there were 7 ships in port today! We arrived at the Acropolis by 8:45am and there were very few people ahead of us in the line to buy tickets.

The tickets cost 12 Euros per person, and included entrance to the Acropolis, Ancient Agora, and the Temple of Zeus. Kali escorted us all over the Acropolis, stopping many times to explain what we were looking at and to give us time to take photos.

You can see in this photo that the crowds were starting to build as we spent our time exploring the Acropolis…

By the time we were ready to leave at 10:45am, there were thousands of people walking up the hill and narrow stairs to enter, so we were really glad we arrived early!

Luckily, Kali had a skill for weaving through the crowds (sometimes against traffic!) and we eventually escaped out to the entrance. The problem was that Nicos couldn’t drive the van up to meet us because of all the big tour buses and heavy traffic, so we had to walk a short distance down the hill to meet him.

After a short drive, we arrived at our next stop, the Temple of Zeus. We re-used our same ticket from the Acropolis and there was no line to enter. Kali escorted us to the only small area of shade as she explained the history of the site, and then we had some time to take photos. By the time we left, there was a huge line to enter because a tour bus had arrived, so we had some pretty good timing thus far!

Our next stop was the Ancient Panathenaic Stadium.

We got back on the bus and drove through Athens to the Prime Minister’s and President’s house just in time to watch the changing of the guards. It was very impressive how well Kali and Nicos timed all of our stops so we arrived just at the right time everywhere we went!

Up next, we drove through the city center and the Plaka to see the market area. We got off the van and walked through the market to eat lunch slightly off the main strip at Hermion Restaurant (per Kali’s recommendation). 

We were bummed that we didn’t have time to shop at all the stores we walked passed, but the lunch was very good. I ordered pork souvlaki with a side of tzatziki sauce (my favorite!) The restaurant had a pretty outdoor seating area in the shade, and they were willing to do separate checks (although they had some trouble processing our credit cards!)

After lunch, we continued walking through the city center until we reached the Ancient Agora. We used our combo tickets once more to enter this site, and Kali walked us through to explain everything we saw. 

Remember that temple I showed earlier from the view at the Acropolis? Well that is the best-preserved temple in Athens, and it is located down in the Agora, so we got to get up close to it.

Our next stop was a half hour drive up to the top of a hill which offered incredible panoramic views of the entire city. 

It was a nice way to round out the day because we had views of all the places we had just visited up close, but I’m not really sure that it was worth such a long detour. By the time we got back down the hill and arrived at the shopping area, it was 3:30pm. Kali suggested we could have 20 minutes to shop, but our all aboard time was 4:30pm and we still had to drive back out to the port and were afraid there might be traffic considering there were 7 cruise ships docked today. We decided it wasn’t worth 20 frantic minutes of shopping to risk possibly missing the ship, so we opted to just drive straight back to the ship. Had I known how the timing would work out, I probably would have preferred to skip the scenic overlook to have more time shopping. Oh well! On the drive back, we passed a few of the venues built for the 2004 Olympics.

We got back to the port at 4pm and spent a few minutes shopping at the duty free stores in the terminal. Then we got back on the ship and got ready for dinner at 6pm.

Dinner Menu:

Prosciutto Ruffles

Sushi

Penne Mariscos

Dessert Menu

Warm Fig, Date, and Cinnamon Cake (one of my favorite desserts of the cruise… it was soooooo good!!)

Strawberry Cheesecake (it was disappointing)

After dinner, mom played a game of bingo (and sadly, she did not win) and then we watched the magician. He was not very good… he repeated the same jokes over and over to fill his hour on stage, so he was funny the first time he did the trick but not every time there after. We then went back to the cabin to unwind and get ready for our next day in Izmir, Turkey!