Cruising the Mediterranean Part 4: Athens and Corfu, Greece

I apologize for the long delay since my last post. Work got extremely crazy and all of my downtime has been spent trying to catch up on things around the house. Anyway...
After an amazing time in Santorini, we headed towards Athens, Greece, to explore the capital city.

The Parthenon.

Cruising the Mediterrenean Part 3: Olympia and Santorini, Greece

We made 4 stops in Greece on our cruise of the eastern Mediterranean. Our first stop, Katakolon, was a short drive from Olympia, the home of the first Olympic games. The second stop, Santorini, was very possibly one of the most beautiful places we have ever seen. It also was home to some of the most delicious food. Greg still claims he is going to take flight to Greece some time just to eat lunch and fly back home.

Town of Oia on the Island of Santorini

Cruising the Mediterranean Part 1: Getting There

Greg and I have been talking about visiting Greece since before we arrived in Germany. Actually, most of the talking was me, with him nodding in agreement. There aren't many things that I feel I absolutely MUST do while in Germany, but visiting the Greek Islands was at the top of my list. When I was reviewing the cost of such a trip, I was a bit turned off by the idea. We don't have a years worth of salary to spend on a trip exploring Greece. Our best alternative was a cruise through the Greek islands to hit up the main destinations. We've never been on a cruise before and I always kind of viewed them as either for the elderly with disposable time and money to spend on a boat or for college kids looking for a cheap spring break trip. Cruises in Europe are a bit different and attract a much wider variety of people, but I'll get to that later.

Our boat tendered off the island of Santorini

Because of our reasoning for the cruise, itinerary was my number one priority. Since we've never been on a cruise, I didn't care much about which company we cruised with or which boat we were on so long as we got to visit a few key places. For me, the most important things to see were Santorini and Athens. I would have also liked to see Mykonos, but there were no ships sailing to all three locations. Also, Mykonos is a little easier to visit on its own according to our German friends, so we may choose to do that in the future if we want to visit Greece again. Another important thing for us was that Greg was adamantly against visiting a few certain countries which were on several itineraries we debated. Ultimately, only one ship met the criteria of what we wanted, the MSC Fantasia.

MSC is an Italian company that started out as a shipping company and now also does cruises. We got mixed reviews about them from people we've met in Germany. Some think they are awesome and a great deal, others feel that they lag behind on the luxuries that most American cruise goers have grown accustomed. Obviously, being our first trip, we wouldn't know the difference between one or the other. Most of the complaints we heard were things that didn't matter to us personally, like lack of activities for kids or serving too much Italian food. It wasn't enough to deter us, and I'm happy for that because we actually really enjoyed our trip and don't have any of the complaints that other expressed.

Our cruise originated in Venice, Italy and had a port of call every day. In order, we visited Bari, Italy, Katakolon (Olympia), Santorini, Athens and Corfu, all in Greece, with a final stop in Dubrovnik, Croatia before heading back to Venice.

My goal is to post about each of our destinations, but getting to Venice was actually an adventure of it's own. Our plan was to fly from Frankfurt to Venice on Friday evening after I got off work so that we would have all of Saturday to explore the city before setting sail on Sunday. Unfortunately, at around 11 pm on Thursday evening, I received an email informing us that our flight was cancelled due to Lufthansa pilots organizing a strike at Frankfurt airport. At around 1 AM Friday morning, we were re-booked on a flight at 8 AM Friday morning. Obviously, we couldn't make this, so we missed that flight. When Greg finally got through to customer service at 10 AM on Friday, our only option was to fly in very late on Saturday. After some debate, we decided to forgo the flight all together and were refunded the money. At this point, our best option was to hop on an 11 hour train ride to Venice.

Sun rise at the Munich hauptbahnhof

First time we've ever traveled by train with cabins.

With the stress over our travel plans and lack of sleep all of Thursday, I ended up being pretty sick on Friday and went home from work early to attempt to relax. We were able to plan out our train trip with the help of the Deutsch Bahn service desk at our local train station. I seriously cannot stress how awesome it is to be able to have someone else plan your whole trip for you and explain all of your route options. Also, it's cheaper to book this way than to use the internet. We save about 80 euros off of the price listed online.

We ended up leaving the hauptbahnhof around dinner time on Friday and arriving in Munich around 10 pm. Our train was full of disgruntled Germans complaining about the Lufthansa strike. I guess we weren't the only ones who were forced into using the train. We hadn't been to Munich before, so at least we're able to cross that off of our list for Germany. Honestly, it was nothing special. Looked pretty much like any other German city. We pretty much headed straight for the hotel to go to sleep.

At 7:30 AM on Saturday, our train left the Munich hauptbahnhof for Venice, Italy. It was a 6 hour train ride through the last bit of the Alps in Austria and northern Italy. I'm not going to lie, we actually really enjoyed this trip. I think the Lufthansa strike was a blessing in disguise because we got to see so much beautiful scenery that we would have missed otherwise. The mountains were incredibly gorgeous and we met some Californians in our cabin that were traveling Europe for the first time. Meeting Americans who are traveling in Europe after having lived here for a year is always an interesting experience. Taking the train was also much more relaxing for me than flying and helped me to get over the cold I had been acquiring, at least for the time being.

 Mountains in Austria from the train window

The 6 hours actually weren't as miserable as we had expected. I got some decent pictures of Austria and northern Italy. It really sparked our interest in taking a snowboarding trip to Austria this winter. We arrived in Venice around 1 PM refreshed and ready to explore the city.

View from the Venice train station.

My next installment will detail our time in Venice and aboard the ship! Unfortunately, Greg and I both managed to get some sort of upper respiratory infection last week, so we've been pretty sick the past few days. As time allows, I promise to update all about our trip for anyone interested!