I went to Greece in 2022 for a sixteen-day trip—the first one I actually chose myself. I’ve loved Greek mythology since I was little, so when my parents said “yes,” I couldn’t stop smiling. We flew via Istanbul to Athens, ready to turn all the gods and heroes from my books into real places and statues I could see.
The trip started with a curveball: delays out of SFO made us miss our connection, and when we finally landed in Athens the cargo hold wouldn’t open—no luggage for three days! We bought a couple of basics at the airport and stuck to the plan anyway. It ended up being a good lesson in travel resiliency: things go wrong, you adapt, and the adventure keeps going.
Athens was everything I hoped for. The Acropolis felt exactly like the videos I’d watched, except more powerful because I was actually there among the temples. The National Archaeological Museum was stunning—I kept trying to name every god and hero carved in marble—and the Museum of Cycladic Art had those strange, almost alien figurines from the late Stone Age and early Bronze Age. We stayed in Psirri, a lively neighborhood with street art and packed sidewalks, all in the shadow of ancient history.
Next was Santorini, where we stayed in the wine-making village of Megalochori. Driving around the island made the size of the caldera (from the great Thera eruption) feel huge. We even did a horseback ride near the cliffs to take it all in. The highlight was Akrotiri, a Minoan city preserved in ash like Pompeii: multi-story buildings, drainage systems—so advanced it could have been 1600 AD, not 1600 BC. Seeing the frescoes in the museum—bright, detailed, alive—was incredible.
On Crete we based in Heraklion to visit the Palace of Knossos. Even with some “imaginative” reconstructions, the scale and age were awe-inspiring. It was wild to stand in spaces tied to the myths I’d read about—palaces, labyrinths, and a civilization that felt sophisticated and mysterious at the same time.
Our last stop was Meteora, north of Athens. After an overnight ferry back from Crete and a train ride, we climbed into a landscape of monasteries perched on 1,000-foot rock pillars. The sunset there felt quiet and spiritual, like the world was holding still for a minute. The whole trip matched what I dreamed about from mythology and then added new layers—real places, real history, and a better sense of how these stories grew out of the land itself.