Exploring Paros

We started our first day in Paros with a huge breakfast by the pool, it was a bit windy but nice and sunny... until it started bucketing down with rain with no warning! We had to grab our food and run inside. It was crazy.

I wasn't impressed that we'd come from lovely hot Santorini, to rainy Paros! 

Luckily it had started to clear up, and was fine again by the time we were ready to start exploring the island. We had thought about going to the beach, but were concerned it might start raining again, so instead we decided to visit some of the other towns on the island, Parikia and Lefkes.

We started in Parikia, about 20 minutes by bus from Naoussa. Parikia is the capital of Paros, and it's most famous monument is The Panagia Ekatontapilian (The Church of 100 Doors). The church is just stunning, and had scarves for tourists to borrow so that people, like me, who wore short shorts could go inside. However, they didn't really enforce the no shorts rule, and people were entering anyway.

Panagia Ekatontapilian (The Church of 100 Doors)

Afterwards, we just wandered around the town of Parikia, which is really small, and completely deserted compared to Santorini. I think Santorini is busy all the time, with cruise ships visiting and lots of tourists, but Paros seems to only be busy during the high season in July and August. In some parts of Paros, we only saw a few people other than us. It was a huge change from Santorini. It was fine in September, but I wouldn't want to visit in the off season, everything would just be closed and deserted.

Parikia is a really pretty little town, lots of white washed walls and tiny alleyways. We managed to find some great shops, and we brought some salad servers made from Olive Wood, which apparently lasts forever.

After wandering around Parikia, we caught the bus to Lefkes Village, in the centre of the island. The village is located at the highest point on the island, and used to be the capital in the middle ages. It only has about 500 people living there. 

Lefkes is a really pretty town surrounded by groves of olive trees, winding stone walls, and the odd Windmill dotted around the hillside. It's home to the beautiful Church of Agia Triada (Holy Trinity), with a huge graveyard behind it. From the village, you can see all the way out to Naxos if it's a clear day.

We only saw about 10 other people while we were there, it was almost deserted. And that included when we stopped for lunch at one of the restaurants in the village.

The Church of Agia Triada

We wanted to take this cute kitten home with us! It followed us all around the church

I love how they serve Greek Salad in Greece, with a huge slab on Feta on top. So delicious!

We caught the bus back in the late afternoon to Parikia, where we could get a bus back to Naoussa. This was the plan. We did not however, know that between the hours of 4.00 p.m. and 6.00 p.m., everything is shut and there are no buses or taxis operating! We got back to Parikia at about 4.30 p.m., so we had an hour and a half to kill... this was the only problem we had with public transport while in Greece, but it was frustrating! 

We wished we had brought our togs with us, so we could have gone for a swim. But we didn't think it would be sunny enough to swim, so we went for a walk along the beach instead, and dipped our feet into the ocean.

We eventually managed to catch the bus back to Naoussa, and returned to the restaurant from the night before to pay... embarrassing. We had dinner there again, since they were so lovely and the food was so yummy. I checked to make sure I had my wallet about 15 times!

We were having dinner on the beach, but it was so windy they had to put the clear awning's up. A huge change from the night before when it was clear and fine enough to sit on the beach and eat.

We watched a huge thunderstorm in the distance over Mykonos, which was just amazing to watch. It was hard to capture on camera, but I got some lovely photos of the stormy sunset.