Wed, 04/03/25    Rhodes

Day 88 - Thursday, April 3nd, 2025 – Rhodes

Another day and another excursion. Another successful day. We woke up this morning at 6:00 AM as the ship was docking into Rhodes, Greece. As I write this, I realize Rhodes is the entire island. Based on the fact that we visited the Old Town of Rhodes and the new town of Rhods I'm assuming this ship docked in the city of Rhodes.

Either way, we were up at 6:00. We had breakfast in the room and made our way to land where we met our tour guide, Vroula, and driver, John. John said next to nothing the entire trip. That can only mean he did not speak much of any English. It didn’t matter to me as long as he could drive the van well, which he did all day. Vroula spoke English through a pretty big accent so I got about 75 to 80% of what she said. She was a nice lady. We loaded into the van, where I was tied down securely.

Rhodes is a large island in the southeast of the Aegean. It seemed like through history just about everyone had an influence on the island. The Turks, the Greeks, Egyptians, Romans and others all controlled Rhodes at one point or another. As we drove around the Old Town of Rhodes, Vroula pointed out the various influences in the buildings and other structures as we passed them. I will let the pictures do most of the talking. We drove this way and that through the Old Town before heading out outside the Old Town.

We drove up to a point where you could see the Aegean Sea meet the Mediterranean Sea. You would not know this unless someone told you, but it was cool nonetheless the views were amazing. After this we worked our way down into a area called Lindos. You say area because it really is an archaeological site, fishing village and popular place for tourists. Yes, it had a market. We had a few picture taking stops before we actually made it down to the market. I was only able to see part of it because there was a couple of steep hills down that we did not want to try. The “downs” were probably doable, but I'm not sure about the “ups”. They were pretty steep uphill. We decided it would be better if I sat in the sun at the top. Mary was on the hunt for the post office because she had heard that there was one down near the bottom of the hill. And it turns out, of course the post office was closed.

We couldn’t get anywhere near the archaeological site of the Acropolis of Lindos. It was too far away and I did not see any path that we could take up there. That was OK by me. We sat down there for a couple of hours taking pictures of this and that. Mary decided that this would be the perfect place to live. She is still on the hunt for a place to live and this time she sounded semi serious about it. I'm not worried yet but you might end up visiting us on the island of Rhodes in the future. You might want to look it up on the map now for future reference.

Our next stop on this adventure happened to be at a roadside restaurant. I include pictures of the menu below. We ended up doing appetizers – saganaki two different ways, Greek meatballs, dolmades, Greek sauce with pita bread, etcetera. I had the red wine. Mary says I liked it, because I don't remember. She had Diet Coke. Simply put, the food was amazing. We have had saganaki in the states countless times, but having it baked here was a different experience. It was better. The other saganaki was feta based. This told us that saganaki is not a specific cheese. The feta version was pretty good although Mary didn't care for it. I’m a fan of dolmades, but as soon as I mentioned grape leaves to Mary, I knew she would not care for them. Overall, this was an amazing roadside stop. On top of it, it was not expensive at all. I don't remember exactly, but it was like 30 or $40.

We found ourselves back in the van headed towards the market. Mary bought more Monster Energy and her Diet Coke lemon. From there we headed back to the ship. We got back at 4:30. We took pictures and said our goodbyes. It was another amazing excursion. Thankfully, our tour guide and driver made it this way.

We made it onto the ship. We made it back to the cabin. We spent the rest of the night in the cabin resting and relaxing like real vacationers are supposed to do. Someday we will learn what it means to be real vacationers. It hasn't happened in these 88 days. It is unlikely to happen in the next 26 either.