Naxos

Our next stop after Athens was the island of Naxos. It's not as popular as some of the other islands like Santorini or Mykonos, but people think it will be soon. It was my favorite stop.

Hotel: We stayed in this great place called the Galaxy Hotel. The room was small but very modern and the shower was great--three different shower heads: a rain head, three massage jets, and a handheld shower head. This becomes important when compared to our next hotel in Santorini.

The hotel was also steps from St. George Beach. The only downside is that they charge you 3 euros to use one of the chairs. Because we're cheap ;) we decided to sit by the hotel pool instead, which was a beautiful infinity pool so it wasn't much of a sacrifice.

Every morning we also had a buffet breakfast that was pretty good. There was a lot of variety and it was much better than I would have expected. Eggs, sausage, toast, pastries, greek yogurt, juice, coffee--yum!

The best part of the hotel was the staff. Kostas was super friendly and not only gave us a ton of restaurant recommendations but even told us what to order. Stefano was a hilarious dude who reallyknows how to get a party started. The hotel hosted a BBQ night complete with dancing afterwards and Stefano single-handedly got a bunch of strangers to start doing Greek dances and generally get their groove on. I will say it's a little disturbing seeing 40+ year old women go all stripper pole on a support beam in the middle of the dining area.

Sites & Activities: There are a couple of museums to check out in Naxos, but the main activity here is wandering around the Kastro/Bourgo area. It's an old fortified castle area with a bunch of winding and intersecting streets. Little shops and restaurants line the maze and it's really fun to just walk aimlessly and see what you find. Got many of my souvenir gifts here, in a little shop called The Loom in the Bourgos. It's run by an Australian woman who's been in Naxos for over 30 years. She said she ended up on the island accidentally when she was trying to go to another island, and she fatefully met her husband and never left. Her shop is full of handmade clothing items as well as other Greek antiquities and influenced items like olive oil soap. I bought several silk scarves there that were all made in Greece--the perfect souvenirs since they weigh and pack down to nothing!

There are three museums in the area. The Archaeological Museum was OK, but it was kind of weird that most of the pieces only had signs in Greek because English is pretty prevalent everywhere in Greece, both written and spoken. It was certainly a more quaint/rustic setting than your typical museum, so things felt more accessible. The Venetian Museum was pretty cool; it's a house that's still privately owned but made available to the public to see the various items in the life of one Greek family over the years. Finally, there's the Folk Art Museum where we could have seen things like the silk production process that produced the scarves I bought , but we never made it there.

Outside of the Kastro/Bourgos, the island also has a famous Portara, or Great Door. It was intended to be the entryway to a huge temple, but construction stopped when war broke out.

Every other part of the temple was raided for use elsewhere, but the door was just too big to move so there it remains.

Willy kept complaining that there were way more naked men statues than naked women ones so I made him pose next to this rarity.

We rented an ATV for a day to explore other parts of the island. You don't really want your driver with that look on his face at any point while navigating the windy roads :P

Naxos is also famous for its marble, which is used all over other parts of Greece. This is one of the quarries on the island. I picked up a few stones on the path of one of our hikes to keep as souvenirs. I love free mementos!

Giant marble statue that didn't quite make it down the hillside intact. Apparently it was common practice to move big pieces when they were only partially formed so that if accidents like this happened it wouldn't be too big a loss. If it survived the transport process, then they finished carving it on flat ground.

And to finish things off, two pictures that sum up my thousand words of what vacation is all about:

Next up: Santorini.