TRAVEL | GREECE | FAVORITE DESTINATIONS

G is For Greece — My A-Z Of Favorite Travel Destinations

An obvious choice considering it’s where I am now!

When I started writing my A-Z challenge of favorite travel destinations, I started an ongoing list of places that correspond with each letter of the alphabet. That way, whenever I had inspiration for a place to write about, I could add it to the list for future reference.

Today when I looked at the list to see what I had written down for the letter G, I was slightly disappointed to see Guatemala as the sole G listed.

Guatemala is certainly very high up on my list of favorite countries, but the thing is, I just wrote about Flores, our favorite city in Guatemala and I included Antigua, another great Guatemalan location in my A selection.

So I felt like writing about Guatemala was starting to get a bit repetitive.

I consulted with Chris, “Where else have we been that starts with a G?”

I couldn’t think of one place, and neither could he. So I consulted Google.

I typed into the search bar:

Countries beginning with G.

You can imagine how hard I laughed when Greece popped up! Of course, it is such an obvious choice, made even more obvious by the fact that we are currently in Greece!

DUH!

Call me a dumb blonde, I deserve it. Haha. We had a good chuckle about this one. Maybe I’ve been working too hard these days:)

Chris and I first visited Greece back in December 2015. We came here as part of a 6-week trip from Canada that had us visiting Bulgaria, Greece and Italy.

We first flew into Athens from Varna, Bulgaria. We spent 2 days in the city, saw the Acropolis and wandered the beautiful streets in the old part, then headed off on the ferry to Paros Island in the Cyclades.

Before coming on the trip, we had decided that we wanted to try our hand at Wwoofing. Wwoofers are volunteers that work on farms in exchange for food and accommodation. We figured that it would be a great way to cut our expenses of the trip, plus we really wanted to learn about growing olives and other Mediterranean foods.

Sadly the place we volunteered had just finished its olive harvest, and we were told to build paths and rock walls throughout their garden instead. We didn’t mind. It was 17 degrees most days and much more tolerable than the cold weather we had left behind in Canada.

At the time I was writing a blog to track our travels. Here is the link to the post when we arrived:

We got to stay in a beautiful private cottage on the property and we were fed amazing authentic Greek food each night.

As part of the working agreement, we had 2 days off per week where we could head out and explore other parts of the island. We were able to travel around the island on the local bus, and even took a ferry across to Antiparos, the neighboring small island, one day.

I think most Greek islands are pretty similar in their landscapes and we enjoyed the small quaint alleyways and the blue and white buildings that are famous in the area.

We also feasted on some incredible Greek food (Scott-Ryan Abt knows all about how good this feta is on this Greek salad), and tried our first glasses of Ouzo.

After spending 2 weeks on Paros, we decided that since we were so close, we had better head off and see what all the fuss was about Santorini. So we hopped on the ferry and arrived there on Christmas Eve.

Approaching the island by ferry was quite the treat as the white buildings spilling off the cliffsides looked like the island was covered in snow…….or icing.

Being there in the dead of winter was a blessing and a curse. There were literally no tourists around, but many of the shops and restaurants were also closed. Especially with it being Christmas.

We did, however, get an excellent deal on a hotel room and I think we only paid about $30 per night.

We rented a car one day and drove around the island, visiting all that we could. Sadly, Akrotiri, one of the main ruin sights that I had wanted to see was closed on Mondays, the day we had the car. I wrote a 2-part blog about our time spent on Santorini (here and here). It was a bit fraught with difficulties, but I also laugh now when I read the posts about how uptight I was back then.

Boy has my attitude changed in the last 7 years!

Of course, Santorini is nothing but spectacular and we were lucky that we had great weather and some stunning sunsets during our short stay.

Flying back to Athens brought us beautiful views of the islands below. I will never forget that day as we had quite the time leaving the island because of Ryan Air and their stupid rules! You will have to read this blog post to learn all about that fun adventure.

Our second, and current, visit to Greece was accidental. If you have been following my latest posts, you will know that we came here because we were denied at the Bulgarian border, then had to make fast moves to get out of Turkey because our Turkish visas were expiring in a day or two. After being stuck at the Greek border for a while, we finally made our way into the country and landed in Thessaloniki.

While we only planned to make Thessaloniki a transition spot while we figured out where to go next, one thing led to the other and we have now been here for almost one month!

The owner of the hostel we are staying at learned that we are artists, and he decided that he had a couple of projects for us if we were interested. So we have been staying here, painting murals, and enjoying the city.

One of our projects has us painting the White Tower, Thessaloniki's most famous landmark.

And we also painted one of the guest rooms to resemble the inside of a castle to go along with the cement bunk beds that he had built.

To see a short 1-minute video of the whole room click here.

Our hostel is located in the old part of Thessaloniki and we take great joy in wandering the streets nearby while soaking in the last rays of the afternoon sun after we finish painting most days.

The old walls surround the city and there are crumbling ancient ruins in every corner.

And of course, we have been enjoying the odd sunset or two from the balcony that looks out from our room.

While visiting mainland Greece has been an entirely different experience than visiting the islands of Greece, we have loved each experience equally. There is much more to see of this fascinating country, and I have no doubt that we will take the time to explore more corners in the months and years to come.

Thanks for reading about our time spent in Greece. I still can’t believe that I didn’t think of it as an obvious choice for my favorite destination posts!

As usual, my gratitude goes out to Sam Millichap who got us all started on the A-Z challenge. There are a few of us taking part and we are all at various stages of the game.

But, I do have to offer a HUGE congrats to Darren Weir who just wrapped up his challenge posts with this article:

And Adrienne Beaumont is right behind him with her post about York, England:

You can read other great A-Z articles by the following writers as well: Anne | Jerry | Nishan | Ronald | Michael | Dan | Robert

To read more about my favorite destinations:

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