Spetses Island 2017
For those of you who don't know, I have Greek heritage. The short and sweet of it is that my great grandfather moved to America, his name got changed from Thymaras to Spetsas (from the island Spetses), and because of that, the family couldn't find him. Skip forward a few generations, and my amazingly talented cousin Dawna reconnected us all! I was the first of the American-born family to go back to the island 3 years ago. It was about time for another visit!
While we waited for the ferry, we had lunch at this really cute restaurant a short walk from the pier.
After a full day of travel, it felt so nice to finally get to the island. We were greeted by a little hedgehog!
Obviously the first thing we wanted to do was hit the beach! It was so much hotter than we are used to in Ireland so we were craving that nice sea water.
Our first beach of choice was Paradise. It's one of the most expensive on the island, but it has a convenient bar and restaurant right on it.
Dinner happens pretty late in Greece, but we still weren't really getting hungry after our huge lunch on the beach. So we had some drinks on the water and walked around the main area of town a little bit.
Our next day was pretty much the same, sans beach. It turns out the heat was making us really tired (we couldn't get the air conditioning working) so we had slept in pretty late. But we still got to enjoy some restaurants and exploring shops in town.
There are a lot of cats on the island, but this one was by far my favourite. I mean how cute is her little tongue?!
After spending a day at Xilokeriza, which is the beach of one of my grandfather's cousins, we decided to seek out the sunset by the water.
While walking around town the past few days, we'd noticed that you could get chairs by the pier, which gave you a really nice, big swimming area. It was a much different experience with all of the big waves from the ships compared to the calm, still cove of Xilokeriza.
The swimming definitely worked up an appetite, so we found a restaurant near the water for some Papoutsakia. To. Die. For. After resting at the house for a bit, we spent the rest of the night taking side streets to dinner and enjoying some more amazing Greek food.
The last beach we went to was Anargyri. It's nearly halfway around the island, and has a hidden cave.
That night we got a little bit dressed up for a nicer dinner in the old port. It's a higher end area of the island where a lot of yachts go. We had dinner literally on the water, I could've dangled my foot over the sea!
There was a massive rain storm so that was the end of our beach lounging. But we did get to wander around a bit more and enjoy the island on our last day.
To see our vlog from the trip, watch the video below. Otherwise, keep an eye out for our trip to Athens, coming up on the blog! You can subscribe below so you never miss a post.