Blazing a Trail...: An Afternoon in Mykonos

Thanks for putting up with all these vacation posts. It's kind of fun for me to re live this vacation again by writing about it, plus the memories will forever be preserved through this wonderful electronic world.

After our two wonderful stops in Turkey it was back to Greece, however this time we were headed to one of the Greek isles, Mykonos. While Santorini is really the Greek Island that is most famous and has the more picturesque spots, Mykonos had a good amount of charm and beautiful beaches too.

Adam and I decided the best way for us to explore the island and hit a couple beaches would be to rent an ATV. So for 20 euro we headed out for a day of exploring this charming little island.

Coming into Mykonos

Enjoying the view from the balcony

Off we go!

First stop was the beach of course, our ship didn't get in until the afternoon, so we had to take advantage of the daylight we had.

While we had read that Paradise and Super Paradise were the most well known and popular beaches, I kind of wanted to find some spots that were a little more secluded. So that's what we did.

First we found a little cove that was only accessibly by a small ATV or scooter, no cars or buses would be able to access it. There were a few, what seemed like locals there, but it was pretty private and a great spot.
It was beautiful and the water crystal clear, however, too cold for me to really get all the way wet. It wasn't exactly scorching hot either. It was maybe 70 degrees and knowing that I would be riding on the back of an ATV, I didn't want to have wet hair and bathing suit and freeze to death later.

Quite the romantic little cove we found.

Attempting to get in. I didn't get very far.

Neither did Adam

Goodbye little cove, that I never learned the name of.

We made another stop at a beach that had a road to it and a name, Agios Ionnis. But we actually preferred our first little beach better, even though Agios Ionnis was highly recommended by Rick Steves. It does have the little town on the hill side to look at, and a couple restaurants there on the beach, so I guess it's more tourist friendly if that's what you're looking for.

We wanted to see more of the island. So we hopped back on our ATV and headed back over to the town to take a look at the Windmills and Little Venice area. Apparently the windmills are pretty iconic to Myknos, so we couldn't miss those.

Little Venice

Petros the Pelican, apparently this guy is famous there.

We wanted to be sure and get our monies worth out of the ATV rental, so we looked at a map and decided to just drive around and see where we would end up. Well, where we ended up was on the top of a hill and out of gas. Now we had done a fair amount of driving, but those things hardly use any gas. And when we rented it Adam asked the lady if we needed to fill it up when, assuming that we would do so before we returned it, just like you do here in the states. Well, the gas gage wasn't exactly working, but we figured if we got it with a full tank we should still have plenty. So off we go to explore and I think Heavenly Father just wanted to make sure we didn't forget to acknowledge Him so he threw a little trial our way. But you know what, the tender mercies were there. We ran out of gas, and there just happened to be a hotel right at the top of this hill, and the hotel let us use their phone to call the rental company, and a guy came within 10 minutes to fill up our tank. He then told us that we were supposed to fill it up before we took it out and use up whatever gas we wanted and if we returned it empty then that was fine. So anyway, lesson learned, get full details before taking off on an ATV with an assumed full tank of gas. I am just thankful we didn't lose too much time and we still had plenty of time before our ship was leaving, so there was no need to panic.

We had to capture the moment.

We decided at that point to just drive back to the rental place and return the ATV, even though we had a full tank of gas. We didn't want to take any more chances. Plus we still needed to explore the little town there. It was great to walk around these charming winding streets and just get lost. It really is a very cute and quaint little town.

We stopped to get a gyro of course, but when we asked if anyone in the town sold falafel, no one did! I was pretty bummed, no falafel for me. But we actually had the best gelato of the whole trip in Mykonos. Go figure.