BabyMoon Day 1: Athens

Hey, ya’ll!

Bed rest seems like the perfect time to start recapping our BabyMoon trip to Greece. While we were there, many of you asked me via Instagram how we planned our trip, where we stayed, what we loved and how I pulled it all off being 30 weeks pregnant. I loved every single second of this trip and I am happy to share all of the details….but be prepared, these posts will be pic heavy (and wordy, because duh, it’s me)! 

Our destination for the majority of our trip was Oia on the island of Santorini in Greece. In order to get to Santorini, you need to swing through Athens to pick up a flight to the islands. We decided that we most likely won’t head back to Greece any time soon we scheduled an overnight stay in Athens to see the sights. 

The trip over is not a quick one, but not the worst ever. We hopped on a plane from our hometown in Maine and flew to Philadelphia where we caught an over night, direct flight to Athens (P.S. we both flew for free thanks to our airline miles. Check out this post for our fave travel tips). The flight time was roughly 10.5 hours and I won’t lie, I was definitely uncomfortable. I think I actually made it worse for myself because the plan was to sleep through the entire flight and hit the ground running in Athens for a day of sight seeing, so I kept checking the time thinking “oh crap, I’m still awake, now I’ll only get 4 hours of sleep…”. I was determined that being pregnant was not going to keep us from doing what we wanted on this trip (ha ha).

We landed in Athens around 9am and, goodness, customs in Greece is a breeze. I kept saying, “is that it?!”. We sprinted through customs in a matter of minutes, grabbed our bags and headed to the Hotel Sofitel Athens Airport. If you plan to make a trip to Greece and want to spend some time in Athens, I highly reccomend the Sofitel. The hotel is literally connected to both the airport and mass transit and mostly handles business and international travelers so they are prepared for check in at any time. I was worried we’d have to leave our stuff in storage at the hotel and just go from there but the Sofitel was ready with our room (which was actually really nice) and we were able to clean up, change clothes and switch out our bags before we hit the ground running.

I will admit that we did little research for our time in Athens but I definately did one thing right: I downloaded an app called GuidePal before we left the States and made sure to download the City Guide for Athens. By downloading the City Guide ahead of time you don’t have to worry about WiFi connections or being stranded on the Accropolis with bad service.
That app was perfection for a quick trip.

The Sofitel staff suggested we take the public metro into Athens as we could pick it up at the very end of the line at the airport. We only had to change trains once and the stop we needed was coveniently named “Accropolis”. Pretty hard to screw up, even for a novice international travler. 

Immediately out of the metro tunnel we proceeded to feed!
Obviously, I couldn’t drink in Greece so I made every single meal count! Each and every one of my (voluminous maternity) tops got an olive oil stain on it at some point during my trip (sorry I’m not sorry!).

Our first stop was a sweet little sidewalk cafe right outside of our the metro stop. As soon as you make it street level there are a million little cafes and I’m sure all of them are delightful.
Side Noote: everyone in that area will certainly speak conversational English and all menus are available in English, in case you’re a nervous travel foodie (we aren’t but I get that lots of people of scared of new foods in a foreign country).

Fist cappuccinos and coffees of the trip!
Justin looks tired and I look puffy, but hey, at that point I think we had traveled for roughly 20 hours and slept approximately 2 of those.

But we were thrilled to be in Greece!

After some nourishment, we decided to head to the Acropolis (which is the name of the highest point in a Greek city) to see the sights and to climb the world’s most slippery steps, just to keep things spicy.

Athens is such an interesting city – a modern landscape mixed with some of the world’s most cherished historical locations.

Historical sites on the Acropolis include the Theater of Dionysus, Theater of Herodes Atticus and the Temple of Athena Nike (I had to pull up the Guide Pall to repeat all of that). And a shit ton of death defying stairs. You can buy a book of tickets that will get you into most of the city’s biggest attractions at the Parthenon – do this, it will save you time and a tiny bit of cash.

Note the impressive guard dog below:

Justin will probably hate that I posted this pic, but I just wanted to prove how much we used the GuidePal app. Seriously, without it we wouldn’t have even known what we were tromping over. A quick history blurb from GuidePal and we were good to go.

After climbing the Acropolis, I needed a break and a water.
Justin needed lemon gellato.
Oh man, do I hope my son inherits those baby blues from his daddy.

After the Acropolis, we headed down the road (on foot, it’s totally walkable, just be prepared to hustle through the intersections, the yellow ones don’t stop) to the Temple of Zeus.

There is a great view of the Parthenon from the Temple of Zeus

The detail in the columns is really gorgeous…props to the Greeks.

In case you’re wondering, I wore the following items in order to be comfortable and s agile as possible (ha): maternity leggings, comfy and supportive shoes that had gel insoles (mine are Steve Madden loafers from a few years back but many people love Toms or Converse for this type of adventure), a maternity tank from Old Navy, a button down chambray top (unbuttoned) when it was cooler in the morning, an Old Navy lightweight pom pom scarf, a hat to keep the sun off of my face and cover my airplane hair and a light weight cross body bag. The cross body is mandatory. That or a backpack…there is no way I could have carried a real purse and handled the stairs and jostles from other tourists.

A dress was not the answer for this particular day. My thighs rub together in a weird way now that I’m pregnant and it hurts like a mother. Leggings were the perfect weight and protected the chub from the rub.

Justin really wanted to see the Panathenaic Stadium (old Olympic Stadium) but I was hitting the wall. I’d say it was around 3 in the afternoon Athens time and we’d been walking for hours on no sleep. I was doing a good job of drinking tons of water but literally felt my hands begin to swell on our walk to the Stadium. The stadium is a bit further away from the thick of things but still not too far from the Temple of Zeus. All in all, we ended up walking the sights in the right order, totally by chance.

We made it to the Stadium but decided it wasn’t worth it to pay for tickets to go in. We stood on the outside and took a few pics and then it was most definitely time to go home.
Especially once I discovered that you had to pay 2 Euro to use the restroom at the stadium. Um, no.

After our photo stop we snagged a taxi and headed to the nearest Metro stop. We showered, grabbed a light dinner at the Sofitel restaurant and hit the hay! I was swollen to the max but we accomplished all of the sightseeing that we wanted/could handle.
I was secretly so proud of myself for being such a trooper.

We went to bed content and ready to hop on our morning flight to our dream destination of Oia, Santorini!

Did I bore the crap out of ya’ll with this post? So many of you asked how we pulled it off without a travel agent or a major plan before landing so I wanted to give you the deets.
 Not to worry, the rest of the trip involved much more fun things like food, pretty sunsets and laying around. Stay tuned!