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Showing posts from October, 2015

15 hours in Athens (take that NYT!)

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How much can you see with only 15 hours in Athens? A lot, apparently, if you are lucky enough to catch the excellent  Free Walking Tour .  We almost were not so fortunate.  We landed at 10am and had to wait over an hour for the shuttle that would take us to our airport hotel, resulting in a mad sprint for the local bus into town in hopes of joining the noon tour.  Say what you will about the Greek economy but I can vouch that their public transportation is on point. The two people who sprinted up to the group standing around Syntagma Square at 11:58am?  That was us. We barely made it.  Had we not, we we would have been hosed since our plan B was "to walk around and look at old stuff".  Plan A was definitely more edifying.  Led by our cheery guide, Maria, we were soon underway.

Chania

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It's October. The summer has passed way too quickly and I am absolutely not ready to either put away my flip flops or dig out the cold weather clothes. I could stay put in Miami and enjoy our perpetual summer but staying put anywhere is not really my style. It was time to hope for warm weather destinations and at least prolong the illusion of summer. The travel gods listened to my pleas (or maybe it was the weather gods..whoever it was is getting an extra candle).  I was presented with a chance to spend four days in Chania, Greece.  Best of all, not only was I avoiding the cold, I was doing so with great timing.  Do you know the only thing better than summer in Crete?  It is the "not-summer" in Crete.  Had we been there a couple of months earlier, the island would have been over run with European tourists.  Now in the off-season, we still got the spectacular weather but without all those pesky sunworshippers to get between us and the choice tables at the seaside spo