Athens, Greece & its port, Piraeus

Pulling into our dock at 0658 after a tumultuous departure from port last night in Iraklion, Crete. It’s a beautiful day in Athens so we got on our tour to Lycobettus Hill, the top of the city, reached by a ground funicular ( a Cable car that runs along the ground with a car at each end connected by a steel cable). We rode to the top of the hill, after we climbed over a hundred steps to get to the lower funicular station😅 Once at the top we were looking across the city at the Acropolis with its magnificent ruins and had a 360 degree view of Athens in its entirety! Also at the summit of Lycobettus hill is a beautiful old Greek Orthodox Church that we photographed.

After a delicious cup of Greek coffee and the funicular descent, we got back in our overstuffed van ( with barely any room to breathe) and drove around the city seeing other significant ruins and remarkable buildings. We then returned to the ship for a bite to eat and to get ready for our “Night in Athens”, This was a huge venue with a family of four Greek folkloric dancers that performed a long show of their dances-it was extremely interesting and fun as they got lots of our crowd of approximately 200 attendees from our cruise ship out on the dance floor with them. We ate a wide variety of delicious Greek food prepared on site and admired the panorama of Athens nightlights in between food courses and dance performances. Then our 3d uses had to race back to the ship so that we could recover our mooring lines and head for another Greek destination tomorrow-Nafplion-a coastal city on the Greek mainland ( Peloponnesus peninsula).Read more