Big Trip Day 281: Our European Bender
Hey friends!
It’s Dory and Justin, but you might not recognize us now, because we’re European. We wear clothing other than swimsuits! We eat cheese! We go to bed at 1AM! We order a liter of wine for the table!
Truly though, life on a new continent has been a major change from our months in Southeast Asia -- not just in terms of the food (although we have been absolutely delighted by the reappearance of salad, dairy, and alcohol in our diets) but also in terms of the people. For the first time since we saw my parents in Indonesia all those months ago, we’ve been spending time with friends and family from back home! Our friends Amelia and Jackson met us in Kalymnos, Greece, and Justin’s mom Nancy joined us for a Big Fat Greek Road Trip that started in Athens. In our next newsletter we’ll tell you about our hop across the border for another friend-venture with Andy and Amelia (not the same one!) and their kiddo Hank, and then two weeks in Spain with Justin’s dad Kevin and his girlfriend Serena! We love you all!! We’re so glad we got to see you!!!
Now let’s do the highlights, starting with...
Kalymnos, featuring: rock climbing, espresso freddos, grilled octopus, tarot cards, and probably too much wine.
For most tourists to Greece, Kalymnos is not a destination. It’s mostly known for its sea sponges and its plentiful octopus; otherwise, it’s just a dusty rock next to a bunch of other dusty rocks that are far more well known for their beachside Aperol Spritzes and beautiful white-washed homes.
But if you’re a rock climber, Kalymnos is famous. It’s one of the better known international climbing destinations, a place where you can explore almost limitless limestone sport climbing by day, and then eat grape leaves and goat stew while looking over the turquoise Mediterranean Sea by night. Our climber friends and general besties Jackson (from Salt Lake!) and Amelia (from Portland!) both agreed to come meet us for our Kalymnos era, and I can truly say I nearly burst into tears when we first spotted Amelia leaving the metro station in Athens. Finally, after all these months!! FRIENDS!!
The rock climbing was as incredible as promised. Jackson and Justin both quested up DNA, a route in a tufa-draped cave that Jackson had clocked online months before as a possible objective. Amelia danced up a bunch of technical face climbs, always making the hard stuff look easy. The options felt limitless -- in the ten days we spent there, we barely scratched the surface.
After climbing each day, we’d ride scooters to the beach, change into our swimsuits, and float around in the cold, extra-salty sea of the strait between Kalymnos and Telendos, the neighboring island. We’d watch sunset at our Airbnb, a beautiful little perch with maybe the best sunset view I’ve ever had, drinking wine and eating local olives while Amelia read our tarot cards or we chatted about the day’s adventures. And then after the sun disappeared, we’d wander into town for falafel pitas, or dinner at Aegean Tavern, where a truly incredible meal was always capped with free loukoumades (little honey-soaked donuts) for the table.
One memorable day, we delayed our morning climbing adventures to eat crepes, drink coffee, and watch the first presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris in our little living room. A few days later, we rented kayaks and paddled out to a white stone cave curved over the ocean for some deep water soloing -- climbing ropeless on rock directly over the water, so when you fall off the route, you fall into the open water below.
In between climbing and eating and delighting in our time together, we all drank a million espresso freddos, Greece’s cold coffee drink of choice and my new favorite: a double shot of espresso with a tiny bit of sugar, whipped with what’s basically an immersion blender until impossibly creamy, and served over ice.
Our 10 days together went by too fast, and before we knew it Jackson and Amelia were heading off for their respective flights home. Justin and I stayed on Kalymnos for a few extra days (sans rock climbing gear, since our friends had graciously brought borrowed equipment for us from home) and enjoyed the quiet island.
Athens to Thessaloniki, yet another road trip!! featuring: grilled sardines, tsipouro in the afternoon, Golden Bachelor, and many ancient buildings.
We went straight from friend time into family time -- due to some excellent trip planning on Justin’s part, we arrived at the Athens airport just in time to reunite with his mom Nancy, who made the long trip from San Diego to spend two weeks with us exploring Greece! We figured since Justin had already spent three weeks road-tripping across Flores with my parents, we might as well make it a Big Trip family tradition. I can confidently state that while this seems like a wild choice at the surface, it’s pretty special to have truly novel experiences -- real adventures! -- with our own/each others’ parents.
We had two days in Athens before we started driving, and our first task was to fulfill Nancy’s first Greek travel request: to eat Greek yogurt in Greek yogurt’s homeland! This turned out to be a brilliant directive; we found an old-school Greek dairy bar in the heart of Athens and started off our time together with a highly memorable, truly delicious, enormous portion of whole-fat sheep’s milk yogurt, covered in honey and walnuts -- with an espresso freddo or two to wash it down, of course. It was at the dairy bar that we also launched our collective quest to find Nancy a proper 12 ounce cup of black coffee in the country of Greece. We tried many times, but I think we only actually succeeded once, when we visited Justin’s friend Lia at her home at the foot of Mount Olympus... who I should probably introduce before we go any further.
Lia and Justin are former co-workers, and she was the perfect friend to contact about this trip, because she’s now a local: she’s Greek-American, and relocated to the town of Litochoro (pronounced Lee-TOE-ho-row) just after the pandemic. Litochoro is where her grandparents are from, and she visited often as a kid; now, Lia and her husband Derek live in a lovely house with three lovely dogs, and Lia spends her time working on the nonprofit she founded, Ecogenia, which is kind of a Greek version of Americorps. (P.S. they need funding and have a US-based nonprofit arm for tax deductibility purposes, consider making a donation as a part of your year-end giving!!) Since Lia travels so much for work, she had some amazing recommendations for where we should go; she sent us a more-or-less complete road trip itinerary linking Athens and the northern city of Thessaloniki, and we just went for it!
So on the morning of Nancy’s second day in Athens, we hit the road. Justin picked up our rental car at the Athens airport, and then the three of us loaded into our Mitsubishi Space Star (yes, that really was the model name) and headed off on our 10 day adventure. You can see a map of our trip here! And as always, we’ve also got highlighted restaurants and places to stay on our Big Trip List.
A whole lot happened in 10 days, so I’m going to break it up by location, with some specific highlights! Here’s a rundown of moments and meals to remember from our Big Fat Greek Road Trip:
Athens - We planned an extra couple nights in Athens to give Nancy a chance to catch up on her West Coast jet lag! She handled it heroically, and spent most of our first day or two (when jet lag is usually the worst!) in high spirits, totally game for walking miles and miles around the old city.
On our big sightseeing day, we ended up stumbling across some small pathways just below the Acropolis, weaving through a web of tiny old houses on narrow pedestrian walkways. Justin spotted a tabby cat fast asleep under a church bell, and later we were briefly and very charmingly hustled into buying some cheap woven bracelets from a Jamaican guy offering blessings and directions on the central pathway.
After parting with a couple euros and photographing the cats to within an inch of their lives, we sat down for what proved to be one of our favorite meals in Greece at Aeridies Plaka, a taverna in a quiet square. It’s a touristy neighborhood, so how such a perfect restaurant could survive is basically beyond me -- but survive it has! Grape leaves stuffed with lemony rice and dill, gigantes (huge beans cooked in a tomato sauce,) crispy cheese drizzled with honey... it was all truly perfect. As our first proper meal in Greece together, it felt like an appropriately celebratory welcome for Nancy!
Our next stop was Delphi, home of the ancient Oracle of Delphi, and our biggest archeology day. We didn’t go to a ton of the more big-name archeological sites (for example, we only saw the Acropolis from afar) but it turns out that old buildings are extremely easy to come by in a country as ancient as Greece. Pretty much every village, plaza, and roadside gas station has a ruin of some kind, ranging in impressiveness from a piece of an old wall to a fully intact castle.
Luckily for us, Delphi was a great choice for our big day of history. In many ways it was the center of the ancient Greek world -- the oracle was responsible for directing all kinds of elements of ancient life, often with no small influence from which family built the nicest temple or reliquary in the Oracle’s name that year. While it’s now a hillside mostly littered with shattered stone structures, Delphi was once a riot of buildings and art: columns standing two stories high with colorful figures mounted on top, and all kinds of carved friezes telling stories of wars and political intrigue. As a child nerd and Greek mythology aficionado, it felt like visiting someplace I’d heard about for my whole life. And as we continued our journey further North, we’d happen across mentions of Delphi all the time. It turns out that when the Oracle told people to go to war, they often did, and that left a major mark on the rest of the country!
After spending the night in a small town near Delphi, we drove a couple hours to Volos for a lunch at a traditional tsipouradiko. These restaurants are all over Greece -- you order a tsipouro (a clear liquor that reminds me of nothing if not rubbing alcohol) and the tavern delivers you mezze, or a small plate, to go with it! The more you drink the better the mezze get (think: grilled sardines, whole prawns...) but we could only ever stomach one or two. Meanwhile, a Greek man one table over had lined up close to a dozen empty tsipouro bottles, and was so overcome by the live music that he broke into dance in the middle of the restaurant. His dining companions, another adult man and one literal child, took a knee to slow-clap along with his performance. Culture!
After our boozy lunch, we needed to drive over a mountain on our way to our next stop -- Justin, wisely, suggested that we fuel up the ol’ Space Star before we went over the hill. I, less wisely, was confident we’d come across a gas station along the way, and that we shouldn’t worry about it. This led to us driving the entire downhill side of the mountain in neutral, Justin maintaining an impressive level of cool as he whipped us along the twisty mountain road, through apple orchards and pomegranate groves, until we rolled into a gas station with the gas light on in just the nick of time.
We spent the next few nights in Chorefto (don’t pronounce the “c”!), or as I like to call it, the sleepiest beach town in Greece. We were there right at the end of the summer season, in a little house perched in an olive grove just a ten minute walk from the white pebble beaches alone. We slept in, lounged on the beach, and Nancy tried her hand at snorkeling with Justin’s expert support. Not bad for a beach trip in September!
Our next stop was Meteora, a town we almost skipped since it’s a bit off our direct track north -- but gosh, we’re so glad we didn’t. We stayed at another adorable house in an olive grove (the proprietress explained to us, in broken but enthusiastic English, that we should come back to help with the olive harvest in a few weeks) and spent our days hiking amongst enormous rock domes and the truly outrageous monasteries that perch atop them. Meteora is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and rightfully so -- these monasteries, built in the 11th century, are mounted so precariously on top of cliffs so high that they truly seem impossible. The magic is in the mystery -- how the heck did they build these things? We spent two delightful days hiking around (and underneath) the monasteries, and also introduced Nancy to the magic of an afternoon Aperol Spritz.
Ampelakia was our next stopover, just a quick night in a random mountain town on the way to our final destination. Unexpectedly, it was delightful -- a town so cute it looked like a Greek movie set, complete with kittens and good-natured elderly locals. We found a table in the quiet central square for lunch, where we ordered local wine and a few small plates while a few tables over, a cheerful group of local men drank beer and chatted loudly. At one point, one of them hopped up and drove away in what seemed to be some kind of bootleg tractor, complete with a smokestack, with which he clipped an olive trellis on his way up the cobbled street. His friends were all cackling at him, and we joined in -- one guy wandered over to our table, pointed at the man driving off in the tractor, and announced: “This? This is the priest of the village!”
Again: Greek movie set. Perfect.
Next stop was the long awaited Litochoro, where we met Derek but not Lia, who was away for a last minute work conference. Derek was the consummate host, fixing us coffee and pastries, and setting us up in their cozy house before we headed off for a day of hiking at the foot of Mount Olympus. After our stroll, we stopped into a mountain refuge for the best goat soup in the world. Derek was attending a friend’s wedding in the evening, but we were kept in good company by their dogs Marvin (a huge Greek livestock guardian dog) and Dori (a tiny black mutt who is not, actually, named after me.)
Our trip ended in Thessaloniki, which Lia described as the San Francisco of Greece. We did more walking around, drank more Mythos beers, found some delicious falafel and gelato near the center of town, and enjoyed our final days together.
Nancy was a great travel companion and an incredibly good sport about the inevitable ridiculousness of travel. We drank many glasses of wine in many olive orchards and seasides, and we’re so grateful she made the trip to spend some time with us exploring a new place. Thanks for coming, Nancy!!
After Nancy headed home, Justin and I got on the train and went backwards -- to Litochoro, where we were hoping to actually see Lia this time around! Unfortunately, her husband Derek tested positive for COVID the same day we were meant to arrive. After talking over the options, we all agreed that Justin and I would come down anyway, book a separate place to stay, and plan to catch up with Lia outdoors -- luckily an easy undertaking given Greece’s terrace culture and the number of beautiful hikes in Litochoro! We took in the sights, ate a lovely meal next to the cobblestone riverbed that in the summer months flows from Mount Olympus, and were inspired to rewatch “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” after Lia told us how much Greek-Americans relate to it. It was only in the final five minutes that I realized this was, in fact, not the same movie as “Mamma Mia.” My loss.
Many countries hype up their culture’s hospitality, but in Greece it felt more true than anywhere else we’ve been. Universally, Greek people were kind, welcoming, and tremendously generous. Greek is a difficult language, and while we could muster hello, goodbye, and thank you, we hardly developed a mastery of it. Still, people were curious about us, invested in communicating, and patient with our questions when they emerged. This was a country that made it easy to be a visitor, and we’re grateful to everyone we met who made our time in Greece so comfortable.
I know at the beginning of this newsletter I mentioned our time in Albania with Andy and Amelia, and our time with Kevin and Serena in Spain... but gosh, this thing is already so long, it’s gonna have to wait! So keep your eyes peeled for our next newsletter, featuring Hank the passport monster, Tirana cocktail hour, a trip to the Accursed Mountains, 1,000 glasses of vermouth, and a health related plot twist.
We love you all, thanks for following along!!!
Love,
Dory and Justin