My friend Jenny texted me today that she was missing seeing photos in my posts. I understand...I miss posting them, and already have over 200 favorite photos to upload. But uploading photos in volume requires three things: high speed internet, adequate battery life and time, and I rarely have any one of these let alone all of them simultaneously. However, we had a late departure from Mykonos tonight, and we still have a weak LTE signal coming from some Greek island. My battery is down to 6%, but that was enough to upload just four photos to a draft post. I’ll recharge the battery enough to write the post before I go to sleep tonight, and publish the whole thing tomorrow morning from Athens.
Have I mentioned that I love Greece (Athens excepted)? I know I have, but have I mentioned it lately? We booked this cruise to return to some of our favorite Mediterranean ports on the islands of Greece, and we were thrilled to have sunshine today for our first stop of the cruise, Mykonos. When we were in Mykonos last time, it was bitterly cold and grey and windy. It was still very windy (the Norwegian Spirit is doing a major list to starboard right now), but only a little chilly today, and it was wonderful to see Mykonos in a better light.
It didn’t hurt that we were able to sleep in this morning. We had been up rather late last evening, and moved clocks an hour ahead to boot. I didn’t finish writing yesterday’s blog post until almost 2am, so it’s not a surprise that it was nearly 10am when we went to breakfast in the Windows dining room. The breakfast menu there appears to not change from day to day, but that’s fine. With its two kinds of eggs Benedict, pancakes, French toast, waffles, eggs all ways, omelets made to order, scotch kippers, biscuits and gravy and…well, there is no shortage of breakfast options.
Armand told us today that Windows dining room is only open for lunch on port days when the ship bass late arrival (such as today, when we arrived in Mykonos at noon). However, today we ate breakfast so late that we didn’t need lunch at noon.
We went up to the Galaxy of the Stars lounge at the top front of the ship to watch our arrival into Mykonos. Even if we had not been able to see the Greek flags taut in the wind, we would have known it was windy from the 20 minutes of thruster action that were required to get the Norwegian Spirit against the pier. We let the first mass of passengers get off the ship before we put on jackets and walked off ourselves. It was definitely chilly in the shade on the water but very comfortable in the sun. NCL had arranged free shuttle buses to take us into town, or we could have taken the seabus boat for €2 each way, but it was too windy to want to be on the boat. Even the harbor had white caps! In fact, we had really wanted to take a boat to the nearby island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis in Greek mythology, but the shore excursions manager told us it would be a very rough boat ride.
Instead, we spent the afternoon just walking around Mykonos town, revisiting places we had seen two years ago in a much better light (literally). We stopped in to the tiny chapel of Agios Nikolaos on the waterfront, and I continued my candle lighting mission. Just like with urinary euros, we don’t go anywhere without a few candle lighting euros in our pockets. We walked through the scenic Little Venice area, where wealthy merchants built colorful homes on the waterfront, wandered the very narrow stone paths between shops and restaurants, and saw the only Catholic Church on the island(there are 400 small Greek Orthodox chapels).
The narrow street and coastal homes of Little Venice.
Finally, we reached the five windmills for which Mykonos is known along a high ridge called Kato Myloi. These windmills used Mykonos’ notorious winds to grind grain for the merchant ships that stopped at the island.
Kato Myloi
We considered having a late lunch/ early dinner along the waterfront but we have such a perfect table for dinner in the Windows dining room that we don’t want to lose it. Instead we took the free shuttle bus back to the port and reboarded the ship about 5pm, giving us just enough time to get to dinner at 5:30pm. Rico and Derek took great care of us. When I couldn’t decide betweentwo different fish entrees, Rico suggested the almond crusted trout and it was delicious. G is thrilled to have a New York strip steak always available and tonight he had slices of whole roasted sirloin. We were so wrong when we thought the food would be substandard in the free dining rooms. Instead, it rivals the best food we’ve ever had on a cruise- HAL’s Nieuw Amsterdam four years ago or our Celebrity cruises of 15 to 20 years ago.
We skipped dessert in the dining room to go to the Stardust Theater for the 7:30pm performance by Beatles tribute band Moondog Beatles. This was fun but kind of wild; the four musicians are Italian and when they sing they sound like the Beatles but when they talk it’s in heavily accented English. We sat further back in the middle of the theater tonight, and the sound was considerably better but the seating was horrible. There was no leg room and the seats sit extremely low. We have heard that this ship, because it was built for Asian cruisers, had some lower seats and handrails and, at least in the theater, that’s very true.
We went up to Raffles Buffet afterward for dessert and coffee. Ever since I discovered they do made to order crepes up there every night (very non-vegan), these things call to me. And G loves all the desserts, which taste even better than they look. I still don’t like how dark the Buffet is in the evenings, but, darn, the food is amazing.
As we sat there, we had a cellular signal from some island we were passing, and enjoyed some texting with friends at home. Our opportunities to do that are going to soon disappear because of the time difference between where we are and home, so it’s nice to do it while we can. And now we are in the cabin, with G mindlessly and endlessly changing TV channels trying to find something (anything) worth watching. As much as we love the Norwegian Spirit, we very much miss the Sapphire Princess’ on demand TV!!!