Reflections on a cruise-cake

The "cruise" is over... and now I think it's time to look back on the experience.

A couple things of note:

First, as I think I mentioned, the tour didn't leave the day it was supposed to. Originally, we were going to meet Saturday evening for Evia Island... but plane delays meant that got pushed back a day. So we ended up leaving the mainland at about 3pm on Sunday instead... but not by our little caique (the 16-person boat) ... but rather, by ferry. The wind was too strong for the boat to make the crossing with passengers.

This would become a re-occuring theme of the trip.

We spent that first night in Karystos.... and the second as well (again, because of the strong winds... the port authority wouldn't let us sail). We then made our way to Marmari, Panagia, Nea Stryta and then back to Marmari.

We ended up missing a couple stops we were really looking forward to (for me: dropping anchor and diving off the edge of the boat, for Jeff: some ancient ruins).

But while it would have been nice to do the WHOLE trip... you can't really predict the weather... and the winds actually made the temperature much more bearable (it was around 35 most of the week).

Other than that, it was a great experience. Evia is a very quiet little island. Most of the towns we visited were very non-touristy... very little english, often no ATMs, most places didn't have debit/credit card machines to pay for goods... very much an old world/new world contrast with Athens (where we are now).

All in all, I'm really glad we did the tour. It gave us a look at Greece we likely wouldn't have seen. And met some great people and interesting characters along the way.