Mylopotamos Beach, Greece

“Travel is humbling because you realize what a tiny place you occupy in this great World.”

Sasha and I traveled throughout Greece for a total of nearly four weeks, where half of that time was spent on Crete Island and the other half on mainland Greece. We began our journey by renting a car and exploring Athens & Delphi with our rental car, which provided us with the ultimate freedom to journey through adventurous towns and villages that were far off the beaten path of most tourists. This blog post will focus on the picturesque Mylopotamos Beach.

MYLOPOTAMOS BEACH

Sitting on a cliffside where the forest meets the sea on the Pelion Peninsula, is the postcard view of Mylopotamos Beach. Rarely visited by foreign tourists, we stopped by on a rainy and cool day, so there weren’t many people, and the waves were big and current strong, making it a bit dangerous for swimming and impossible for a calm snorkel. The views on this particular day looked very different than the normal calm, turquoise waters we saw on postcards, but we thought that made it even more spectacular.

(Click on each photo to enlarge it)

This rock looked exactly like a Greek zucchini! The Greek zucchini rock!

Hot DAMN my fiance is fiiine! 😉

“Love consists not of gazing at each other, but looking in the same direction” (and a little bit of gazing at each other) 😉 

After a dip, we headed out on a three-hour drive to Meteora, where it pelted rain the entire time. It was raining so hard that Sasha and I could barely hear each other talking in the car! Greek drivers tend to be cautious and polite, so half the road was pulled over, or people slowed down, driving with their hazards flashing to be more visible. Whilst passing through the thunder and lightning storm, I got really excited and told Sasha that I wanted to see lightning in Greece, which he thought was strange. Once I saw it, I could officially say that I had seen the real GREECE LIGHTNING!!  (I know, major musical theatre nerd.)

Sasha and I were shocked at how empty the main highways were. Greece’s population is approximately 10 million, and 5 million of them are in Athens. We loved how easy it was to find areas where there were few to no tourists or even locals around! In our opinion, driving in Greece was easy and laid-back (though after driving through Colombia where trucks come directly at you in your lane around windy mountainous roads, our perspective has likely shifted.)

When searching for accommodation in Central Greece, Airbnb is always an excellent option. However, if you’re only passing through and want to stay in a place for only 1 – 2 days, sometimes small hotels were a great option. We would check Booking.com to ensure that there were accommodations available (we visited in July during peak tourist season so it’s good to check). Once we found out the price, we simply showed up to the location and negotiated a lower rate if we paid cash. Many times on Booking.com’s website, it will say, “hurry! Only one room left!”, which is a lie. This is a sales technique called “urgency” to get you to book, and a technique I am very familiar with being in sales. Though our hotels turned out to be a good experience, we always prefer Airbnb over hotels, even locally-run because we like to have a kitchen and more space, usually for less money.