Day 17 Mykonos to Piraeus

An early start as our ferry to Rafina left at 7.30 am but it was a very pleasant 4 hour trip to arrive at the port of Rafina on the mainland. Here we caught the bus to Athens airport and then collected a rental car so we could drive the coastal route to Sounion, stopping at the lovely town of Lavrio for some lunch. At Lavrio we were overwhelmed by the hordes of teenagers walking the streets and filling up the restaurants - what were they all doing?

We arrived at the stunning Temple of Poseidon situated on the southern point of Sounion, it's easy to understand why this spectacular cliff was chosen as a significant spot since at least the Bronze age.

From here we took the coastal route through Glyfada back to Athens, so we could collect a jacket M had left in the apartment we had stayed in. We knew it wasn't going to be much fun driving into Athens at peak hour at 6pm, and all the one way streets and lack of parking was difficult to handle. K jumped out of the car to go into the apartment to collect the jacket, where she was taken to the rooftop only for the man to discover he didn't have the key. While this was happening M was doing loops of the city. Eventually K made it back to the car, but a wrong turn meant we found ourselves in the middle of Plaka. Plaka is the tourist hub so tourists walk down the middle of the narrow dead end streets. After a few false starts and dead ends we managed to escape without hitting any tourists - a definite achievement!

We continued on to the port of Piraeus, dropped the car off, booked into our hotel and went across the road for a dinner of Thai food, of all things! It was a very strange set up where they gave us the menus and left the order pad and pen on top of the menu, so we figured out we had to write our own order! The chicken stir fry was surprisingly tasty and spicy but the Penang curry wasn't to K's liking as the beef had a strange texture and didn't taste like beef.

The hotel in Piraeus was a nice change from some of the places we'd been staying in, it was lovely to have a comfy bed and pillows as the beds in Greece have been rock hard and the pillows not the best (but what do you expect for some of the prices we've been paying!?).