Big Fat Greek Vacation

We made it to Greece on Friday evening after about 37 hours of traveling! The majority of the travel wasn't too bad. We caught a metro out of Sorrento at 6am on Thursday, a train at 10am, another connection train around 1pm, a bus to the ferry terminal in Bari, and then an overnight ferry to Patras, Greece. The ferry was actually kind of fun! We met two Canadians from Montreal traveling to Greece that we hung out with in the ferry terminal and the entire time on the boat. We spent the evening playing games and enjoying the boat with them. I think we must have stayed up until 1am or so, which included a "Disco Tech" bar which was totally empty and hilariously lame. We asked them to play some North American music. Didn't get any really, but we did happily belt out Toto's "The Rain's Down in Africa" together. Good times! (the song's been stuck in our heads for days now!)

Sleeping accommodations were too funny. It's not a normal ferry. It had a pool, restaurant, bar, etc. I know that sounds incredible...but picture a ferry version of a pool. It's not the glam of a cruise ship. But nicer than a train nonetheless. Our ticket gave us an airline-type seat, but they hardly reclined at all, so we ended up sleeping on the deck with all the other backpackers. You should have seen it! People and their stuff sprawled out and sleeping in every little nook and cranny of this boat. One guy was spread eagle in the kid's playhouse area of the ship. So, we got into our little sleeping bag things and crashed on the floor also between chair legs. It was quite an experience.

Then our bus trips in Greece were an entirely different story. It was a complete nightmare!! I don't think the Greek people were very thrilled with us Americans. They were less than friendly - to say it politely. And then our bus broke down on the trip from Patras to Corinth. No one spoke English to let us know what was going on. All we knew was that the bus driver had several belts on the ground...no good! And then in Corinth they were downright nasty to us and would tell us that we couldn't get on the bus and that another would be there in 5 minutes...which it wasn't! At any rate, we did finally get onto a bus that was an hour and fifteen minute standing room only. We didn't care. We were just glad to be on it.

The remainder of our Greek experience, however, has been incredible! This village is the cutest, most quaint little place. We are totally in love with this place. Mark and Adrienne's house it incredible and the view is unbelievable. We had dinner last night with several of the people from the village which was the best experience. Everyone was so friendly and told us all sorts of stories from their past village experiences. These are exactly the authentic experiences that we wanted out of our Europe trip.

We wanted to post some pictures of our adventures. They're from Rome to now.