Naxos

by Forest on November 3, 2010

We arrived in Naxos at noon on Wednesday the 6th after the 1.5 hour ferry trip from Santorini (We had opted for a high-speed ferry which cost around 60 euros for 2 tickets).  We walked to a hotel that was recommended in our Let’s Go guidebook.  Hotel Grotta had a room available for 60 euros a night including breakfast.  We signed up for two nights.

After a warm welcome from the staff which included free drinks, treats and a thorough explanation of things to see and do, we headed to the beach because the weather was awesome.

We spent the rest of the afternoon lazing at the beach before heading back into Naxos City to explore.  We grabbed dinner for 30 euros at a nice place Bird had picked out from the guidebook.  After dinner we wandered the small streets of the Kastro and did some shopping.  Bird bought some earrings for 15 euros and we also got her sister a Christmas present.

Thursday, October 7
The weather had turned a little cool and cloudy over night and it looked like it might rain at any time, so we decided to rent a car for the day and see the island.  Renting the car along with insurance cost us 40 euros.  But when I got in the car to drive it away, I noticed it was empty, like way past the E.  So I asked the rental guy what the deal was (since in America when you rent a car it comes with a full tank and you must return it with a full tank (thereby paying only for the gas you use)).  Well, the man at the counter told me if I found it on empty I should return it on empty and pointed out the closest gas station on the map.

We made it to the gas station and a man came out to pump for me and asked me how much I wanted.  In probably the stupidest financial move of the trip I told him to fill it up and then proceeded to talk with Bird about our upcoming adventures.  I didn’t even think twice about it.

Looking back I can only assume I had these thoughts running through my head:

  • I have no idea how much gas I need
  • I have no idea how big this island is
  • This is a tiny car.  How much gas can it even hold?
  • The sign at the gas station says something like 1.40 euros which doesn’t sound terrible

When I hear the pump click indicating it’s finished, I look over and am stupefied to see that this tank of gas just cost me 55 euros (around 75 bucks!).  Oh, of course I forgot that they sell it in liters! Woof!  I barely had enough cash to cover it when the guy wouldn’t accept my credit card.

So with a full tank of gas, we head up into the mountains to explore Naxos.  And I’m determined to drive all day and use up all this gas!!!  We stopped in the small town of Halki and had an amazing hike for a couple hours through the olive groves.  The scenery was breathtaking.  Definitely a highlight of our time on Naxos.

We stopped at a market to grab some bread and cheese  for lunch and then we proceeded to drive through the mountains.  Let me tell you, I loved driving this tiny car on these tiny, curvy moutain roads.  There was no one around and the scenery was beautiful.  Unfortunately, Bird was not enjoying it quite as much and got a pretty bad case of motion sickness.  So we pulled into the seaside town of Apollonas to have our lunch and let Bird recuperate a bit.

Eventually we headed back to Naxos City and turned the car in after using less than a quarter of a tank of gas.  Blergh.  That was such a waste of money.  But a lesson learned and a story to be told.

That night we grabbed a cheap gyro dinner (7 euros for 2) and stopped by a travel agency to purchase ferry tickets to Paros for the next day.  These tickets were pretty cheap (only 15 euros for 2 (slow boat)) because Paros is just a short one hour ferry trip away.

Friday, October 8
After grabbing breakfast at the hotel, the staff shuttled us to the port and we headed off for Paros.  The last island we were going to visit before heading to Athens on Saturday.

Thoughts:
Naxos was fantastic.  The Hotel Grotta was amazing and we would highly recommend it.  We saved money by eating breakfast at the hotel each morning.  Naxos is a big island so renting a car was a good idea so we could explore other parts of it especially when the weather was too poor for us to be at the beach.  Of course, we wasted money on gas but that’s okay.  We also saved money by opting for the slow boat tickets to Paros instead of the fast boat which would have been almost double the cost.

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Santorini

by Forest on November 2, 2010

Click here to read about the first few days of our trip.

Sunday, October 3
We arrived in Athens around 9 am on Sunday morning and after collecting our bag and going through customs we headed to the information booth to inquire about catching a flight to Santorini.

After being pointed to a travel agency booth, we end up paying around 120 euro each for our one way flight to Santorini.  That’s a little more than we would have paid through an online site, but again, we didn’t know ahead of time which day we would actually need to book the flight for.

We chose the flight over the ferry because even though the ferry was cheaper, it would have taken about 8 hours.  We hopped a plane at 11 am and by noon we were touching down in Santorini.

In an effort to save money, we decided to take the bus into town even though everyone else on our flight had opted for a cab or been picked up by their hotels.  After waiting almost 45 minutes with no bus in sight, we decide we didn’t fly 4,000 miles to spend our vacation at a bus stop so we took a 30 euro cab ride into town.

Even though we had not booked any hotels for our trip, that doesn’t mean we hadn’t done our research.  I had used TripAdvisor to pick out several promising hotels so we arrived in Oia and headed for our first pick.  No vacancy.

A friend had highly recommended a place in Firostefani so we took the bus over there.  The hotel our friend recommended was closed for the season.  So we wandered aimlessly looking for a place to stay.  It was hot and I was lugging around our backpack so I was ready to find a place and settle in.

Eventually we stumbled on the perfect place (Hotel Galini) which ended up being cheaper than our first pick would have been.  100 euros a night.  After all the hot and unproductive wandering we had done we were ready to take just about any place that had a room.  So we were pretty much sold even before they showed us the view.  It was breathtaking.  We signed up for 3 nights.

After cooling off and cleaning up, we headed out to explore Firostefani and then Fira.  We ended up paying too much for dinner that first night, but it was mostly because we didn’t know where anything was and we ended up paying the price for a caldera-view with dinner.  It was a little splurge for our first night in Santorini.  I think dinner was about $75 in US dollars.

Monday, October 4
The weather was still perfect on Monday, so we decided it would be a beach day.  We saved money by taking the bus to the beach and we bought groceries from the market for breakfast and lunch.  All that money we saved was soon wasted when we ended up having to spend almost $25 US on sunscreen because we didn’t pack any.  For some reason we were under the impression that we wouldn’t need any in early October.  Wrong.

The beach was great and it was hot enough that it felt great to hop in the cool water and swim around.  After a long day at the beach, we headed back to town on the bus and stopped for dinner at a gyro place.  We were pleasantly surprised to find out that these not only tasted awesome, but they were ridiculously cheap.  We pretty much decided right there that we would probably be eating a lot more gyros on this trip.

After dinner we stopped in a travel agency and bought ferry tickets for Wednesday when we would be heading to Naxos.  We also bought boat tour tickets for Tuesday which would take us to the volcano and hot springs.

Tuesday, October 5

We woke up and grabbed a bite to eat at a cafe.  Then we went to meet our bus that was taking us to the boat for our tour.  Well, no bus ever came.  After waiting for 45 minutes, we headed over to the travel agency to see what happened.  I was afraid we were going to be out a hundred bucks or so but they were totally awesome and apologized and gave us a refund.  We decided to book a different tour that was scheduled for that afternoon.

It worked out perfect.  We grabbed a gyro for lunch and headed to the port to meet our boat.  The boat took us out to the volcano where we were allowed to get out and hike around.  After hiking to the top and then back to the boat, we were taken to a hot springs area.  The sea here is supposedly heated by the active volcano, but we jumped off the boat and swam around and it wasn’t all that warm.

Overall, I’d say the boat tour was a little bit of a disappointment but it was nice to get off the island and to see the island from the sea.  It was also nice to actually have something to do rather than just wandering around some more.  It turns out that we ended up being quite happy that we missed the first tour because we saved money and we felt like this tour was just about the right length.  The first one was scheduled to be almost 3 hours longer.

Arriving back at port, we paid 5 euros each for the chance to ride a donkey back to the top of the cliffs and I thought that was totally worth it.  We saved ourselves a hike up 600-some stairs and we have an unforgettable memory of the donkey ride.

Can’t remember what we did for dinner that night but I know we were treated to yet another incredible sunset.  Every night they were awesome!

Wednesday, October 6
We hopped on a bus to the port in the morning and then boarded our ferry to Naxos.

Looking over my notes, it looks like we spent right around 750 euros for our 3 days in Santorini.  We knew going in that Santorini was going to be the most expensive of the islands and it was.  We knew it was the most popular island and the most touristy, so we had planned to spend a little more here and hopefully we’d make up some savings on the other islands.

Of course there are things we could have done smarter/cheaper.  We could have booked our airfare to Santorini online for cheaper.  If we would have booked a hotel ahead of time, we could have arranged a pickup from the airport to save us the cab fare.  We also could have probably picked an even cheaper hotel.  We could have brought sunscreen from home.  We could have bought more groceries instead of eating out, but we like to eat out on vacation so I don’t feel bad about that at all.

There were a few ways we saved including:  We bought groceries for some meals.  We didn’t do much shopping for touristy junk that we didn’t need.  Though we did keep up the tradition of buying a Christmas ornament in all the places we vacation.  We took the bus a lot instead of renting a car or ATV or cab. Those are just a few examples I can think of off the top of my head.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with our spending for the first leg of our trip.

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Net Worth – November 2010

by Forest on November 2, 2010

Here are the stats as of November 1st.

SAVINGS:  $39,524 (+$2,845 or 7.8%)

Even though we took a European vacation, we were really helped out by the fact that it was a 3-paycheck month for both of us.  We added money to the car fund, the downpayment fund, and the general savings fund.

INVESTMENTS:  $18,766 (+$478 or 2.5%)

We added maybe $150 to our portfolio this month, the rest is all gains.

RETIREMENT:  $68,929 (-$104 or less than 1%)

The market was kind to us here, but I realized that for the last few months I was looking at the overall number on one of my old 401k s and not the vested amount.  There was a difference of a couple thousand and since I don’t work there anymore the odds are I won’t get vested.  For now on I’ll be careful to make sure I calculate using only the vested amounts of our accounts.

STUDENT LOANS:  -$25,416

Slow and steady as always on this one.

Overall, our net worth increased by 3.5% to $102,291.

I’m so pumped we broke the 100k mark this month!

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Trying to Get to Greece

by Forest on October 28, 2010

In an initial effort to save some money, we make a couple of decisions in mid-summer.

  1. We will fly standby using buddy passes provided by Bird’s father who works for the airline.  Buddy passes are $450 each and the cheapest tickets I could find were $900 each.  So we’ll be saving almost a thousand bucks right from the start.
  2. We decide to go in the shoulder season of October hoping that a) tourist season will be pretty much over so hotels will be offering their low season prices and b) we have a better chance of making standby flights also because tourist season is over.

The obvious benefit of flying standby is the savings.  The problem is you don’t know for sure if you are going to make the flight you want, so it’s hard to plan the rest of your trip because you can’t make hotel reservations or ferry ticket bookings ahead of time.

So the question is:  Is saving $900 worth it when it keeps you from planning the rest of your trip and you factor in the potential anxiety of not knowing which flight you’re actually going to get on?

Friday, October 1

We are scheduled and assigned to catch an early morning flight from Minneapolis to NYC and then to catch a connecting overnight flight to Athens.  To make a long story short, due to bad weather in NY and just plain bad luck (flights were full or there were higher priority standbys), we don’t make any of the flights to JFK or LaGuardia on Friday.  We called my brother to come get us from the airport and we headed home and will try it again tomorrow.  One day of vacation wasted.  Frustration and anxiety levels rising.  Little vacation expenses already start adding up including buying breakfast at the airport along with bottles of water, etc.

Saturday, October 2

Oh, did I mention our luggage made it on the first flight to JFK on Friday even though we didn’t?  Saturday morning we arrive at the MSP airport only to find out our scheduled flight to JFK was canceled.  More stress.  We end up getting listed on the next flight to LaGuardia and we make this flight!  Yay!  We land at LaGuardia and take a cab over to JFK to find our luggage and make our connection to Athens that evening.

When it comes time for the standby passengers to get on, there is one seat available in business class and one in coach.  I tried to be a gentleman and give business class to Bird, but she has flown first class internationally on a couple of occasions and I never have so she lets me have it.

After all the frustration of the last two days, I’m starting to think this standby stuff is alright as I recline my seat way back and eat and drink my fill.

Cab fare, misc. airport costs, meals:  more little stuff that wasn’t exactly expected and we’re not even to Greece yet.

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Greece by the Numbers

by Forest on October 28, 2010

$3,580

Let’s just get the big number out of the way right up front.  That’s the final total for the trip.  It’s more than I was expecting but not exactly surprising considering we didn’t have a budget and made a couple dumb financial moves while we were there.

The good news is we had more than that in the travel fund so I’m not beating myself up about it.

Instead of writing an epic post about a week’s worth of adventure, I’ll break it down into separate posts.

Trying to Get to Greece

Santorini

Naxos

Paros

Athens

Trying to Get Home

I’ll update the links as I get them written!

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Greece in Pictures

by Forest on October 27, 2010

Blue skies

A room with a view in Santorini

Firostefani

The donkeys of Santorini

The famous Santorini sunset

The red beach

Our hotel room balcony

Another sunset

A boat tour took us to the volcano and for a swim in the volcanic hot springs

It looks like snow on a mountaintop but it’s actually a city on a cliff

The color of the water is hard to describe

On top of the volcano

Donkey ride

Glad the donkey is making this climb and not me

Inspiring scenery

More of the same

Fira at night

Sunset at the marina on Naxos

A hike on Naxos led us to some cool discoveries

Our drive through the mountains was equally as awesome

An old windmill

The gate of Apollo’s temple on Naxos

Sunset on Paros

Odeum of Herodes near the Acropolis in Athens

Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens

A night view of the Acropolis from our hotel rooftop

Be sure to also take a look at Greece by the Numbers.

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Net Worth – October 2010

by Forest on October 14, 2010


Since we were in Greece on the 1st (or attempting to get there…we didn’t actually arrive until the 3rd), I didn’t have a time to go through the accounts until we got back.  So here’s a snapshot of our net worth as of October 13th.

SAVINGS +$1,242 to $36,679  Up 3.5%

Nothing special here this month.  Though it will take a hit next month when we withdraw from the travel fund, although October is a 3 paycheck month so maybe it won’t be so bad.

INVESTMENTS +$5,147 to $18,766  Up 37.8%

The market was kind to us.

RETIREMENT +$8,325 to $69,033  Up 13.7%

Again, the market performed like a champ in September.

STUDENT LOANS  +$228 to $25,651

Slow and steady as always on this one.

Overall, our net worth increased by $14,985 to $98,827.   A pop of 17.8 percent!

I love it when all the categories are green.  And we are SO CLOSE to the 100k mark!  It will be a battle in October between Travel Expenses and 3 paychecks.  We’ll have to wait to see which one will prevail and which way our NW will swing next month.

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