1st Stop: Athens, Greece

Hi everyone! I have decided to break up my cruise post into each city because if I didn't this post would be painfully long. And, I must start out by saying that the cruise was literally one of the best weeks of my life! We ate and drank our way through the all-inclusive, danced the nights away and on top of that saw some of the prettiest places I have ever seen! After my flight was delayed for about two hours in Alicante, I made it to Madrid. Seven of us girls were going on the cruise together. Jenna, JT and Caitie were coming from other travels and Jordan, Emily and Lauren took the bus from Alicante to Madrid. So, we all met up nin Madrid and spent the night in the airport together, sprawled on the floor of the airport, attracting strange looks from passerbyers. We were able to check in for our flight at 4:30 AM, our flight took off at 7:00 AM from Madrid and we landed in Athens at 11:30ish. I slept for the entire flight, which was great and then I woke up in Greece feeling rested.

We checked into the cruise ad received drinks upon arrival, thank you Happy Cruises! We dropped our bags off in the two rooms that the seven of us were sharing. They were pretty small but I was pleasantly surprised by our ship. I've never been on a cruise so I would have been pleased with a sail boat. I did hear from my fellow travelers that compared to the American cruises that they had been on, our ship was rather small and ill-equipped. But, I cannot complain, the crew was amazing, it was clean and they took good care of the only Americans on board. This included having to have our passports stamped in each city by customs but they were happy to help us with that as the only non-European Union passengers on board. I think by the end of the week, everyone knew who the American girls were thanks to the shout-outs in the disco and to the intercom announcements calling for us to bring our passports to the concierge.

Anyways, we were all still pretty tired so we decided to do the cruise-organized excursion (yes, I am a little embarrassed, but we were tired and didn’t have much time in Athens). Needless to say, it was our first and our last. We saw the Olympic Stadium of 1859, where the first official Olympics were held. We also saw the Parthenon and the Acropolis which were both amazing. We had some time to walk around the Acropolis when we had our first encounter with Italian men. While we were all sitting there admiring the view and taking pictures, these 4 Italian college age guys started jumping in our pictures, joking around. So, we tried to start talking to them but they didn’t speak a word of English or Spanish and none of us can speak Italian so we were resorted to hand motions and over pronunciation of Spanish words in hopes that there was a similar word in Italian. We failed. Afterwards, we headed back to the boat and had our first delicious dinner on board.

Then, that night we went out to the disco and made some friends with the Spaniards on board as well as the some of the crew members. In fact, some of the Spanairds from Murcia knocked on our door that night at 4 AM and came in singing me Happy Birthday! Ha, it was a nice gift. Went to bed, woke up in Turkey!