Beach Day in Sounio (also last day in Greece)

#rick #greece

Our friends Christos and Mary had been helping us play our trip to Greece and sheerly by luck they were arriving in Greece just in time for us to spend a day together. Christos, being from Athens, knows that the first thing to do upon arriving in Athens is to drive an hour south to the coast, so we went to meet their family at the resort they were staying at.

It was an amazing final day in Greece. We did a quick tour of the temple of Apollo that overlooked the beach then spent the next six hours swimming, relaxing and eating at the beach.

The temple was interesting, and the location at the southern point of the mainland gave it an amazing view of the Aegean, but after spending the previous day at the Acropolis we were pretty done reading placards about old temples. It was much more impressive to view the temple from the resort while relaxing with a beverage later in the day.

Upon leaving the temple it was a short 5min drive down to the beach. The kids, and Ruby especially, jumped right in with Theodora and Margarita, snorkeling and looking for fish, building sand castles and just generally being kids on the beach. Graham spent a little bit more time with the adults and especially enjoyed trading Greek Mythology stories with Christos' brother George who lives in Athens and is also a fan of the stories. Graham also did some serious experimenting with building floating sand castles.

Lunch was an experience. Since we had three families our Greek friends introduced us to their preferred style of ordering. "Order two of everything, then ask people if they want anything special and order that too." It was a wonderful seafood feast only 50m down the beach from where we had been swimming. Ruby, likely driven by peer pressure, tried all of the fish. Calamari, somethign between a sardine and anchovy, grilled Sea Bream. It was great to see. The kids also had another huge pork chop.

We ended up not getting home until after 7 and quickly tried to pull dinner together. We didn't realize that the grocery store closed at 8, and Emilie and I almost got locked in. We were on the second floor trying to put a mean together and had to open a couple doors to get back to the first floor. when we appeared near the check-out counter the staff all started staring and speaking very quickly in Greek. Fortunately, they let us check-out, but they were not interested in letting us finish our shopping. The upside was we got to supplement our last mean in Greece with take-away Souvlaki for one last time.

The day at Sounio made a big impression.

1. It's amazing that 45min from a huge city like Athens you can be at beautiful beaches

2. We really appreciated the hospitality of Christos and Mary

3. We could have spent more time in Greece