Oh the Places I'll Go

We have now completed our cruise around the Aegean Sea on the Viking Venus, and I thought I would share some final bits and pieces about the trip. The first stop after leaving Athens was Volos, the sixth largest city in Greece with a population of about 150,000.   Here is a view of the town as we were arriving in port. One of the selling points for Viking cruises is “an included tour in every port.”   Our shore excursion for this day was a bus ride up the winding switchbacks of Mt. Pellos with stops at two of its twenty charming villages:   Portaria and Makrinitsa.    Our visits to these towns were marred only by the fact that Viking sent at least six busloads of passengers on that same included tour so the streets were teaming with tourists from our ship, all wearing Quiet Voxs around our necks with earpieces that allowed us to hear only our particular guide’s narration of the tour. Scott and I managed to find a quiet café where we enjoyed a STRONG Greek co...

I suspect that, like me, you have seen the photographs of Santorini, the Greek island that is almost always represented by white buildings with blue domes.  Getting to see Santorini in person was one of the anticipated highlights of my cruise around the Aegean Sea.  It turns out that those two iconic white buildings with the blue domes are not representative of the town that is perched on a rocky cliff high above the sea.   Here is a view of the town of Fira, the largest city and the capital of Santorini, at sunrise.  I took this photo from our ship, the Viking Venus. Santorini is a volcanic island--actually five islands—with the towns built in the calderas left by previous eruptions.   We began our exploration of the island with a motorized sailboat trip to the uninhabited island of Nea Kameni which most recently blew in 1955.   We hiked up the lava-strewn mountain to the caldera—the depression formed when a volcano blows its top...