Day 5 – Antiparos

We both had the best sleep and woke up at 9am feeling refreshed and ready for the day. I made up our sandwiches whilst Louis figured out departure times for our next ferry to Naxos.

We packed up Oscar (our day bag) and headed to the port to collect the Ferry tickets. The locals had told us about how beautiful the beaches were in Antiparos – a small island by Paros, so we decided to go there and spend the day catching some rays.

The journey to Antiparos was awful. The huge waves were making the boat rock from side to side. This scared all the passengers on board- the kids were screaming and the adults were screaming and crying. To be fair I was also pooping it and even asked a member of crew was it normal. His response – “not normal but perfectly safe”. Oh buoy! We are in for a bumpy ride.

Thankfully the journey only took 30mins and we arrived safely. By the port there was a bicycle rental store and I suggested we rented one to explore the island. At first, Anna looked at me with disgust but then the duck egg blue vintage bike got Anna’s attention and suddenly this was a good idea. She suggested we beach crawled – cycle, sunbathe, cycle to the next beach, sunbathe etc… I explained to her that there was no point in that as you would spend 10 mins setting up and the next 10 mins packing away everything again. We quickly abandoned that idea and headed to the closest beach by foot.

Having left our umbrella at our hotel, in utter rage, it was time to finally fork out €5 for a sun lounger and it proved to be a great investment! We stayed at this beach all day and even found out the breaking news that Paros was voted Number 1 island in Europe 2018 (9th in the World).

As we packed up to head home, I mentioned to Anna that it was a reasonably drama free day and that our readers would not be happy. Of course I said this too early. The boat back was cancelled because of the wind and so we had to get another ferry to the other side of the island. We nearly missed it too and had to run to get on it – the Greek’s don’t like informing you of any changes to their schedules.

To make matters worse, we then had to wait 25 mins for a bus, along with another 80 people who were all fighting to get a seat on it. Through some smart manoeuvring and a bit of pushing, we just about got on but were sat in front of 3 Americans and 2 boys of England (on their lads holiday after their A-Levels). Although it was only a 10 minute bus journey, the American girl must have uttered the words ‘I feel like…’ more than 100 times. I feel like I was going to lose it if the journey was any longer.

When the food was so cheap for dinner last night, we resorted back to our same restaurant – Pepe’s Souvlaki – for some €2.70 gyros and for a cheap dinner. Thankfully there were all new staff tonight.

Coincidentally, we had booked to stay during the Paros Festival, which continued for 3 days and celebrated the history and ongoings of Paros. Therefore all the shops and museums stayed open until late and there was a real buzz about the place. At 8.30pm there was supposed to be a walking music concert on violin and lute where the musicians would walk around the town playing Greek music, but we couldn’t find them.

We did bump into a Greek Jazz band kind of thing who were entertaining people in one of the side streets of Paros. After listening to then for a while, it was time to return home as we were up early to get our next ferry to Naxos.