My name is Caroline Mehner and I’m a student at the University of Hartford. I studied abroad with CIS Abroad in Athens, Greece!
When a few friends and I decided we wanted to take a trip to another island in Greece, we decided to investigate traveling to Agistri, a small island about an hour ferry ride away from the mainland. We spent a bit of time researching different places to stay, found a wonderful place right on the beach in the town of Skala, booked our ferry tickets, and were about to embark on an adventure I’ll never forget.
My friends and I woke up very early the day of our ferry (around 4:30am) and got ourselves to the port of Piraeus. Once we landed at our destination, we had to walk from the port to our Airbnb. We got to our place and got settled in, walked around the town for a while, and headed to the beach to get a bit of swimming in before we headed out for dinner. We walked up a mountain, through random unmarked streets, not really knowing where we were going, to find this hidden gem of a restaurant that served incredible food. After dinner, we walked back to our home for the weekend, and settled in for bed, after a long day of traveling and exploring.
When we woke up, my friends and I decided we desperately wanted to go to several beaches and check out as much of the island as we could, since we had such a short amount of time there. As we were walking around the town, we noticed there was a place where we could rent electric bikes for the day for only 15 euros each! We decided this would be an incredibly cost-effective way to get around and would be a great way to see everything we wanted to throughout the day. We got our bathing suits on, packed up our bike baskets and we headed out, not realizing how much ground we’d be able to cover. We started off by biking to our first beach, about a 5-mile bike ride away, was Dragonera beach. A beautiful, and very popular spot for tourists. We ended up not spending a ton of time there, mostly because we were excited to continue seeing everything else that was to come.
We got back on our bikes and traveled another location called Mariza beach. This was less of a beach, and more of a concrete platform where people can lounge, as well as jump off into the water. It was incredibly beautiful, and my friends and I ended up spending a few hours there swimming and laying in the sun. Eventually we started getting hungry from all the moving around and it was time to find some lunch. We got back on our bikes and rode around until we found a super cute restaurant that had amazing food, we ordered Kolokithokeftedes (zucchini balls), Horta (bitter greens) Rooster in tomato sauce, Tzatziki and bread. The meal was incredibly flavorful and filling, I still think about it today.
After we ate, we started heading back to Skala where we were staying, because it was slowly approaching 7:30PM when we had to return our bikes. We coasted down the roads of Agistri and continued our exploring a bit, stopping frequently, taking beautiful photos of everything we saw. Once we got back to our Airbnb, we went to the beach out front and watched the sun set. After that, we got ready to go to our last dinner on the island. We struggled to pick a place to eat at first, even walking into a restaurant and having them laugh at us because they were so busy, and we asked if we would be able to get a table.
I believe everything happens for a reason though, because we ended up going to a restaurant next door, called Moschos. We had the most charismatic server I have ever met and we had wonderful banter the entire time, he really made the dining experience incredible for us, even giving us a few on the house items with our meals. After dinner we headed back to our place to get packed up and ready to leave so the morning would be a bit easier and went to bed. We headed back home to Agia Paraskevi in the morning and reminisced on all of the wonderful things we had just gotten to do. I look forward to going back to Agistri again in my future, one of the best places I have ever been!
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