As Seen on TV
July 4-13, 2024
People often ask us, “Where is your favorite place to travel?” There is no simple answer to this question. France is our favorite place to eat; Switzerland is our favorite place to play outside; Southeast Asia is where we’re most eager to return. But if we had to choose an all-around favorite, it very likely might be Greece. There are many reasons we keep coming back: delicious food, friendly people, and a seemingly endless number of beautiful places to explore. Photos of our Greek vacations have elicited serious FOMO in our family and friends, who gazed upon the sparkling blue waters and uttered the timeless words of Liz Lemon: “I want to go to there.”
At least, Kirb’s mom has used that exact phrase in response to our previous Greek vacations. So, it wasn’t a big surprise when she eventually decided that she wanted in on the action herself. Lauren and Dennis originally planned on taking the four of us on a massive cruise ship through Greece and Turkey in the spring of 2022, but we canceled the trip due to Covid concerns. These concerns were clearly well founded, as Lauren and Dennis went on a different cruise to Alaska shortly thereafter and both caught the virus onboard. We’ve never been on a massive cruise with thousands of other passengers, and to be honest, we weren’t entirely sure that we were going to enjoy it anywhere near as much as we should (based on the hefty price tag). But Lauren and Dennis still wanted to see Greece, so we found a middle ground we all could enjoy: A sailing trip on a small gulet with only a handful of passengers and crew.
We’d done two trips like this before in Croatia and Turkey and both were fantastic experiences, but finding the same sort of package in Greece proved surprisingly difficult. Most operators wanted you to book your own private boat and hire a skipper separately, which we did not want. Eventually we found a company called Sail In Greece that offered private rooms on a shared boat with a cook and crew included, all for less than 1/4 of the price of what we were going to pay for the big cruise ship in 2022. Lauren and Dennis were happy to pay for the trip as long as Kirb and Mazz did all the planning, which was a good deal for us since the general idea was to have a boat sail us around for a week with a set itinerary. We chose to return to the lush, green Ionian Islands on the west side of the Greek mainland, forever smitten with the area from our trip to Kefalonia in 2019. Lauren had seen a British TV show set on Corfu called “The Durrells” and was entranced by the scenery, so we picked a weeklong sailing adventure that began and ended at Corfu port. But first, we would meet up in Athens before traveling out to the Ionian Islands together.
Like in many other famous European destination cities, high season is hellish in Athens, with far too many tourists for anyone’s liking. Even on a rainy morning, Lauren and Dennis weren’t able to get into the Parthenon before the quota of visitors had been filled for the day. We secured reservations that night at Oikeio, a warm and cozy restaurant with fantastic versions of traditional Greek dishes. Lauren and Dennis admitted they weren’t exactly sure what to expect of Greek cuisine, but were quickly won over by the feta with honey, giant beans, and stuffed courgettes.
In addition to the great food, Oikeio had an excellent vibe and cool decor
When we booked a cute Airbnb in the Corfu old town in January, we were surprised to find that it was one of the few remaining lodging options still available for July. This kind of widespread pre-planning could only mean one thing: Germans. (Also, to be fair, Americans like Kirb’s folks, who similarly plan quite far in advance.) When we flew home from Crete the year before, we were shocked and amused to discover that literally half of the flights leaving Heraklion airport were headed to Deutschland. Germans love holidaying in Greece. With the European Football Championship in full swing, Kirb brought along his Deutscher Fußball Bund jersey and prepared himself to be mistaken for one of the many other Germans visiting the island of Corfu.
The flat we rented was hidden away in the backstreets of the neoclassical old town, and once we actually found the place, it proved to be an excellent base for exploring the most beautiful and interesting part of the city. On our Airbnb host’s recommendation, we enjoyed another fabulous meal at Fishalida, with fried calamari, shrimp risotto, and Lauren and Dennis’ first taste of grilled octopus - our perennial favorite menu item in Greece.
That night, Germany was playing Spain in the knockout round of the Euros and we struggled to find a good spot to watch the match, settling eventually with standing room around a television set up in the middle of an old town pedestrian street. Kirb stood next to a Romanian woman who now lived Barcelona and each heartily rooted for their adopted countries. Spain won in the waning minutes of overtime on a beautiful header, shattering the spirits of the German travelers in Greece and across the globe.
The next morning, we found a bakery serving traditional Greek yogurt with nuts, birds nest pastry, and local honey. It was without a doubt the best cup of yogurt we’ve ever eaten, though the baked goods at the shop left a little something to be desired. The bill was decidedly not cheap, and we realized that we were going to pay a much higher premium in name-brand Corfu than we would on smaller, less-frequented islands. With prices like these, it was surprising that Germans still decided to come here in droves.
Morning fuel at Rose's Bakery
The busses across the island were impossible to figure out on our phones, and Lauren and Dennis have a lot less patience for toiling in the heat to save a few Euros than we do, so we took a €50, 30-minute cab ride to the town of Palaiokastritsa, instructing the driver to drop us off at the monastery on top of a steep and winding road. The grounds were gorgeous, with colorful flowers, ancient frescoes, and panoramic views of the coastline and town below. At a nearby waterfront bar, it was easy to spend the afternoon sitting and drinking Aperol Spritz in the shade, looking out over the sparkling blue waves and rocky beaches. 10/10 excellent Greece stuff in Palaiokastritsa.
There were 18 passengers on our boat, the Hera, and you never know exactly what sort of people you’re going to get when you book a sailing trip like this. We’d had good luck on our previous boat trips, so we weren’t particularly worried, though you’re always a bit anxious to learn who you’ll be spending the next week lying next to in your bathing suit. Lauren and Dennis were concerned that they would be the oldest people on the boat, but those fears were unfounded. There were two other couples who were significantly older - one of which who was barely upright - and the average age of the passengers was much closer to Boomer than it was to Millennial. In fact, there was only one couple on the boat younger than us, in their mid-twenties, and we wondered if they considered us peers, or olds, or something in-between.
A language barrier evenly divided the group: half of the passengers were German-speaking and the other half were Brits (and us Americans). Four friends in the German contingent quickly commandeered the seating area on the bow of the boat and covered it with their personal effects, ensuring that none of the other 14 passengers felt comfortable trying to sit there. The vibe on this boat was definitely less inviting than we had hoped, but everyone otherwise seemed nice enough to spend a week with. Looking at the enormous cruise ships across the harbor, we were certainly glad we weren’t one of thousands of passengers on those boats. We stayed docked in Corfu harbor that night and many of the passengers watched England beat Switzerland in penalty kicks on the ship’s TV, much to the disbelief of the Brits on the boat.
The itinerary for these kinds of cruises is generally the same from day to day: Everyone eats breakfast and lunch together on the boat, which spends the morning and afternoon leisurely strolling to a swimming spot and then a port for the evening. Our first overnight stop was Sivota on the mainland, with terraced buildings rising up along hills that surround the docks. We had a delicious dinner at a small restaurant called Diapori, with grilled eggplants and feta, Greek salad, and stuffed grilled squid. One thing we particularly love about Greek restaurants like this is affordable carafes of cold white wine for €10-€14 a liter, which always pairs perfectly with seafood on a warm summer evening.
Greek salad, pureed fava, and roasted eggplant with tomato, feta, and balsamic glaze
The boat had given us a few complimentary bottles of wine when boarded, so we opened one up for what promised to be an excellent sunset. Before it had even gotten dark, several people were already asleep on the benches next to us. This was going to be a real party boat, that much was certain.
Our second port was a little farther south on the mainland, and when we arrived to Parga in the late afternoon, it was properly hot out. There was a castle perched up above the city, and despite the heat we decided to ascend up the cobbled streets to check it out. At the top, we bought some cheap, cold beers from a shop and cracked them open on the castle walls, overlooking the water and town below. After, we ate grilled fish beneath the ancient fortress walls and strolled by shops looking for gifts and souvenirs, evening activities we would happily repeat night after night. The streets of Parga only seemed to get livelier as the sun set, a sea of bodies and sparkling lights in the dark. When we retired back to our cabin, it seemed like the party was only just beginning in town. The Germans at the front of the boat looked particularly exhausted the next day; they were out dancing in Parga until four in the morning. They said they had a fantastic time.
There were four crew members on the Hera: captain, repairman, housekeeper, and chef. Like the other passengers, the quality of the food on the boat can have a pretty big impact on how much you enjoy the week. Cooking for 20+ people is difficult enough on its own. Doing it all in the tiny galley of our boat seemed borderline impossible, until we saw the massive spreads laid out for us each afternoon for lunch. Though the food on the Hera wasn’t as excellent as it was on our Turkish cruise, the meals that Mohamad prepared were consistently good, and we were never left wanting more. That said, a little decent coffee would have gone a long way that week. Clearly, the crew serving the coffee were not coffee drinkers themselves, as evidenced by the cup of truly putrid warm-brown liquid Kirb was served at breakfast on the first morning. Immediately after that maiden meal, the Germans (of all people) went to the store and bought some more palatable coffee and asked that we be served that instead.
The next two evenings would be spent in Gaios on the island of Paxos, situated just south of Corfu. There are a collection of shops, bars, and restaurants right on the water and not a whole lot more to the town, so after a short stroll in the afternoon heat, we stopped for margaritas. After (rightfully) focusing on seafood for our first few dinners, Kirb wanted to introduce his parents to proper Greek gyros. We found a place with decent reviews and ordered up a big plate of shaved meat, fries, tomatoes, and tzatziki, but the pita bread was served in small triangles that made it impossible to properly wrap everything up together. This was not a dish worth going out of your way to eat, which is a shame when you’ve only got a limited number of meals to enjoy on a trip. Kirb has eaten some exceptional gyros in Greece, but this time around he would not get the satisfaction.
Gaios is cute, but not particularly lively off the boardwalk
The boat barely putzed for 15 minutes to find a swimming spot the next morning, knowing that we were going right back to dock in Gaios that evening. It was at this point that the long hours of inactivity on the boat began to wear a bit thin. It was scorching hot laying out in the sun, but that was where the majority of the comfortable seating was located - eight lounger beanbags on the top of the ship. The Germans were still effectively annexing the bow of the boat, taking up shaded seating for eight with the detritus of four. On the back of the boat, there were two cushioned, shaded areas, but one of the elderly British couples claimed one every morning and then laid there for the remainder of the day. That left one remaining comfortable, shady area for the other 12 passengers on the boat to share, though we generally ceded the space to one of the octogenarian couples. When you’re sitting idle on a boat for 8 hours, sometimes you just want the option to stretch out and relax in the shade, and it was starting to become frustrating that other people on the boat weren’t sharing the public spaces. Mostly, that left our group upright and seated for hours in wooden chairs at the table, which, as a silver lining, is the most conducive position for drinking wine in the early afternoon.
For our second evening in Gaios, we booked an excursion through Sail In Greece in which we would be driven to the other notable towns on Paxos. We extended the offer to join to the others on our boat but there were no takers. The van was instead filled with everyone from another Sail In Greece boat docked right next to ours, one that was filled with single folks instead of couples. Inside of this van, we quickly realized that we were on the wrong boat. Also Boomerish in average age, this group was a lot more fun than the one we had been stuck with. The van would stop in each town for 45 minutes, which was only enough time to look in shops or grab a quick drink at a waterfront bar. There were lots of great-looking restaurants in Loggos, but not enough time to eat at any of them, which felt like a shame. In Lakka, we were greeted by a smiley beagle mutt and became fast friends. A shopkeeper came outside and informed us that the dog’s name was Ollie and that he wasn’t a street dog; his owner lived in the next town over. During the day, Ollie was a man about town in Lakka, where he was well-known and well-regarded, and when his person got off work in the evening, he would walk himself home. What a good boy.
That night, England played the Netherlands in the Euro semifinals and instead of fighting over seating at a particular bar we got beers from the grocery store and wandered from TV to TV in the old town. Eventually, we ended up at the same bar we’d gotten margaritas at the day before, as there were several other looky-loos floating around the periphery there who wanted to watch the match but were also not particularly interested in €10 cocktails. Against all odds, England managed to eek out another terrible win and sneak their way into the finals, much to the belligerent amusement of the British crowd at the bar.
One of the big highlights on Corfu that Lauren was looking forward to was the Blue Caves, and based on how many giant passenger ships drove up to the gaping stone maw during our 8 hours parked outside of it, the destination was on a lot of other Corfu tourists’ bucket lists as well. We would have honestly preferred ducking into the cavern and then promptly leaving too, as there were scorching temperatures that day and virtually no wind, so even in the shade it was hard to stay cool. Eventually, Kirb reached his limit of not having a comfortable shaded place to lay down and read and asked the British couple who had been sitting in the same lounge area uninterrupted for the entire trip if they would mind sharing the space with everyone else. They seemed a little embarrassed to have been called out on hogging the space, but graciously vacated the area nonetheless. It’s awkward having to remind adults about simple elementary school concepts like sharing and being considerate of others, but in this instance, one discomfort simply outweighed another.
That night was the Captain’s Dinner, in which Mohamad cooked all day to produce a truly impressive amount of seafoods, salads, and sangria for the passengers and crew. After, there was a stunning sunset that turned the entire sky yellow. Captain Stellios began to shuttle groups to the shore at Lakka, but the inflatable dingy had been acting up all day outside the Blue Caves and continued its issues into the evening, stranding us halfway between the Hera and the town. Kirb had to grab an oar and help paddle us back to the boat, which he felt comfortable doing after teaching several canoe camps over the summer. Once back, the boat’s mechanic Rodos worked some magic to get the motor purring again, a magic that Stellios could not seem to replicate, so Rodos took over the task of ferrying all the passengers to and from the town. We looked for Ollie, but he had already gone home to his person, so we just ate ice cream and enjoyed the sunset without him. That night we drank wine with the Germans on the front of the boat and had a humorous time, auf Deutsch, as they egged on the crew to demonstrate evocative Middle-Eastern dance moves.
For the final night we docked in Corfu again, and when we pulled into port we wasted no time getting to a new part of the island. Again, the busses proved impossible to navigate on our phones, so we shilled out another €50 in cab fare to get to the town of Pelekas. Just like in Palaiokastritsa, we had the driver take us to the very top of the hillside town, uninterested in slogging uphill in the heat. You can see all the way across the island from the Kaiser Wilhelm II Observatory, and there are cold beers and big bottles of water at the restaurant just outside.
For dinner, we made our way to a restaurant called Pink Panther specifically for its view. There were no other customers for the majority of our meal, which we enjoyed on a balcony with one of the most incredible panoramas we’ve eaten in front of. Catching a bus back into the old town from Pelekas proved relatively straightforward, and when we returned, we found the streets packed with tourists beneath a cotton-candy pink sky.
We disembarked from the Hera the next morning and stashed our luggage at a restaurant by the harbor with the promise that we would return later and buy lunch. Lauren decided to spend her final morning on the island shopping, while the rest of us went to explore the town. We paid the entrance fee to get inside of the old fortress and found the area to be largely uninspiring, finding more enjoyment in cold drinks at a café overlooking the water than in the surrounding Venetian architecture. Lauren and Dennis needed to be at the airport in the early afternoon, but our flights back to Berlin weren’t until late in the evening, so we looked into the possibility of renting a car to get us around for the rest of the day. Surprisingly, there was a service called Locar that was willing to deliver a rental to our luggage restaurant in under an hour. The day with the car - delivery included - only cost €53, about the same price as a single cab ride across the island. It was great that having a car instantly sorted out getting the four of us to the airport at different times, and gave us autonomy to move around the island and see whatever we wanted, but to be honest, the real sell was the prospect of sitting in front of air-conditioning all day. Kirb had already sweat through one shirt by noon.
The road northeast of the old town takes you through steep hillsides along the coastline, and we found that the smaller, more-isolated beaches on this part of the island were still immensely crowded. After several hours of driving, we settled on an area called Canal d’amour, where you can swim in turquoise waters beneath eroding sandstone walls. We rented shaded sun beds, ordered some iced coffees, and Kirb promptly fell asleep on a pool floatie.
Driving through the heart of the island made getting back to Corfu a lot simpler. These towns were much cuter and more rustic than the numerous, surprisingly-run-down areas we’d seen over the course of the week. These hill towns echoed memories of classic culture; the sun-scorched ruins of late-stage capitalism that lined the waterfront did not. Overall, we thought Corfu lacked a lot of the traditional Greek charm that we enjoyed so much on neighboring Kefalonia, but to be fair, we saw a lot more of that island than we did of this one. Corfu is quite big, and in general quite lovely, but the hype behind it doesn’t do visitors any real favors. What does deserve hype, however, is Locar, because they let us drop off our rental directly at the airport and then came to meet us in the parking lot and taxi us over to the terminal. One thing remains the same across all of our Greek adventures: the people there are exceedingly helpful and rational when it comes to renting out cars on the islands.
The last time we went to Greece, our EasyJet flight from Crete had mechanical issues on the runway and we took off too late to arrive before BER’s midnight curfew. We were forced to land in Hannover and take a 3 am bus back to Berlin. Did we learn any sort of lesson from this? My dear reader, you can be assured that we did not. We were so excited that there was a direct flight between Corfu and Berlin that we didn’t even second-guess the possibility that it was a trap. And it most certainly was! This time, the control tower didn’t let us take off in time to beat the curfew - which meant no reimbursement from the airline, as it was “out of their hands” - but as a fun surprise, EasyJet decided to deposit us in a new location in the middle of the night: Poznan, Poland. There was a general panic getting off the plane, as the flight attendants were telling us that there were busses arranged to drive us to Berlin, while an email sent by the airline explained that actually, due to overbooking, there were not. We rushed to the road out front, found some busses, and desperately asked one if it was headed to Berlin. It was, and without even caring if it was our bus to Berlin, quickly snagged two seats. Ultimately, this was the bus that we were supposed to be on, though a particularly pale and clammy-looking passenger hacking out both her lungs made us ask if we could get on a different bus instead. We could not! Sometime around 6 am we finally stumbled through our front door in Berlin. Will we learn a lesson from this horrible experience with a low-cost airline? We like to think so, but we probably won’t.
We love a good challenge, and planning a trip that could be equally enjoyed by Millennials and Boomers alike was an interesting one. Corfu had the name recognition to instantly get Kirb’s parents excited, but we found that there were some drawbacks to choosing a “destination” island over a lesser-traveled locale. If asked for a recommendation, we’d still send someone to Kefalonia. Regardless, there are plenty of good reasons why tourists flock to Corfu from around the world (but strangely not Asia; we did not see any Asian people this entire trip): The scenery is breathtaking, the food can be divine, and the people are friendly and welcoming. In the end, it was a lovely family vacation with lots of laughs, time spent together, and beautiful sights seen. What more can you ask for?