Days 14 - 16 - Paros

When you spend 3 days on the beach it makes sense to just group everything together or else you would have 3 almost identical blog posts.

We left Santorini around noon on day 14 (July 25), and arrived in Parikia, on the island of Paros, around 2:30.  We went to our hotel, which was only 400m from the port, settled in, and grabbed our swimsuits to head to the beach across the road.  The beach was fine, with decent sand, but a very rocky shoreline, so we decided that the next few days we would go to other beaches on the island with not as much rock.

That night we went out for dinner at a restaurant on the beach, and enjoyed a good meal of rabbit stew and a mixed appy plate.  Lindsay didn't like the rabbit, but Mike thought it was nice (having never had it before and not knowing if it was cooked properly or not).

The next day we rented a scooter and took the 60km trip around the island, stopping at 2 different beaches, Santa Maria, and Golden Beach.  Most of the day we spent at Santa Maria, which is more of a clubbing beach, complete with pumping music, which we determined we were too old for.

It was a very busy beach, with hundreds of people on it.  This must be one of the top beaches on the island based on the amount of people there.  The sand was nice, and the waves relatively calm, so at least we enjoyed the 4-5 hours we spent there.

On our way back to the hotel we then stopped at Golden Beach for the sunset, walked in the rolling waves, and talked to one of the windsurfing shops to find out about lessons and the cost, as we determined we would come back to Golden Beach the next day.  We then made the 20 minute scooter ride back to the hotel, had a cheap meal of hamburgers at a local restaurant, and went to bed.

On our last full day in Paros we caught the 11:40 bus to Golden Beach, as we missed the 10:30 bus writing our blog post :)

The bus ride was horrible...they took the long route to Golden Beach, which was about an hour, and it was in a VERY full (standing room only) hot bus, without working Air Conditioning.  By the time we arrived at Golden Beach, Mike was feeling awful, so he had 2 Gravol, we ate lunch, and then found some beach chairs to sleep in.  The restaurant that we went to for lunch was actually part of a resort, and as we were finishing lunch we noticed that there were beach chairs on their nicely manicured lawn, so we quietly slipped over to them, plopped our stuff down, and pretended that we were guests of the hotel :)

Honestly, these were the best beach chairs we have found.  They were well built of wood, with well made cushions, and having grass below you instead of sand was fantastic.  It was much cooler, and to add to that, we found some in the shade of one of those large pineapple trees; it was awesome!  We stayed here for the day, and after a few games of Ticket to Ride Europe on the iPad, Lindsay talked Mike into paying for windsurfing lessons together.

Windsurfing was a lot of fun, but hard to learn and get used to.  We do think that if we had more time and practice, we might be able to get the hang of it, but in the short hour we had to learn we did OK and there are promises of an exciting career in windsurfing.  We wanted to get photos, but unfortunately as we were both out at the same time we were unable to :(

For the bus ride home it was much nicer - we were sitting closer to the front of the bus, had a bus with higher backs to rest our heads, with working AC, and as it was later in the day it was not as hot.  Mike also got drugged up before we left so he slept most of the way back to Parikia.

We had a later dinner, around 9pm, and then went back to the hotel to watch Bruce Willis in "The Kid", and went to bed.