From Revelations to ancient cities, Greece tour continues.

Looking down at our ship from the Monastery of St. John on Patmos.

Our family adventure through the Aegean area continues as we board our new intact ship in Kusadasi. We had a wonderful night sleep and lazy morning before heading over and dealing with some minor incompetence with the bus and ship crew. The bus driver let us off the bus so we had to walk through a shopping area which normally is not a bad thing but with my mom on crutches I was disconcerted to see the bus pull up with our luggage just outside the security area where we finally arrived on foot. The ship crew grabbed our bags but had them sent to the wrong cabin. I was beginning to worry about this cruise line but it turned out okay and we had a very nice room with a sizable deck. The roll out bed was again not good, but all in all it was a pleasant room with very nice staff. When we went to muster for the lifeboat meeting, I asked the crewman where we should go if the boat was to say collide with another ship and that area was damaged. For some reason he did not have an answer for that.

Beautiful paintings adorn the walls of the monastery.

The Monastery of St. John

So, right away we sailed to nearby Patmos. This was not on our original itinerary but I was delighted because this is the island where the apostle John lived in his later years and where he wrote Revelations. While mom rested her foot and relaxed Dad and I headed out on the excursion. We were taken on a bus up the large hill (of course, everything is on top of the mountains on these islands). We had a hike up the road to the Monastery of Hagios Ioannis Theologos and it was worth it. As we stepped in to the courtyard and waited to enter the inner sanctum, we viewed the beautiful ancient paintings that adorned the walls and arches. They were biblical scenes and portraits of the saints. The views from the top were stunning. There was a museum there with wonderful artifacts.

The Cave of the Apocalypse

The sacred cave on Patmos. The far corner is where John fell asleep.

The apostle John was the only one of the original 12 who did not die a martyr. Not for lack of trying on the part of the Romans. After failed attempts to kill him, he was banished to the island of Patmos where in his golden years he received visions from God that inspired the book of Revelations.

John fell asleep in a cave on the hill on Patmos and recited the visions to an assistant who wrote them down. The cave now is surrounded by a chapel. We walked through a gift shop and down many steep stairs before entering the cave. It seemed to me like an indentation in the hill with massive boulders sticking out of the roof area. We walked past the spot marked off where he slept and under some more roof boulders. There in that ceiling area was a three line crack in the rock symbolizing the holy trinity. It was a wonderful feeling to be in that place where John lived in the Spirit. It was a very nice excursion and back on the boat we enjoyed a nice dinner and viewed the stars off our deck.

Lindos from the road.

Rhodes—Lindos

Day two on our new short cruise was spent docked at Rhodes. Our excursion took us out to the village of Lindos, an ancient town at the base of an Acropolis. This was a steep long hike kind of day. We could see the Acropolis from miles away. It sat on the edge of the Aegean Sea. The buses parked at the top of a hill so the walk started with about a ½ mile hike down to an area where tickets and taxis could be obtained (note for our trip back up). We wound our way through the narrow pretty streets of the village. The pedestrian streets were canopied with vines and occasional openings where we spied the mountain ahead. Many courtyards and floors were made up of black and white pebbles arranged in pretty designs.

The guide mentioned the hike up was several hundred steps so I tightened my knee brace, filled the water bottles, and took a few photo breaks. At what seemed like the top, we saw donkeys (would have been nice to have them at the bottom). Some entrepreneurial women spread their beautiful linens over the side of the hill to sell them to the many tourists walking by. After a few minutes listening to the guide, we made our way up some steep and scary steps into the Acropolis,

Women from Lindos spread their linens along side the hill.

The Acropolis at Lindros housed a church, columns of a stoa, a temple, another hill within the fortress that was filled with boulders, and views through the gaps in the wall of the Sea and the village below. We strolled around for a bit before heading carefully down the steps and path to the village where we did some shopping before heading back up to the bus and off for a tour of the ancient city of Rhodes.

City of Rhodes

We entered the ancient city on foot over a bridge that covered a dry and very wide moat. We didn’t do too much here but did see the outside of the castle, walked down the Knight’s Street, and then just through some of the streets where we shopped, checked out the locals that live there, and spotted an active public fountain in a big square.

We were on our own coming out of the ancient city since it was right at the port and we could casually walk over to our ship at our leisure. We spent the entire day there—I went to the pool and my dad went back to town to walk around a bit.

It was one of the more relaxing days on the cruise with pretty views of the port from the pool and our deck. In the late afternoon we left the port and sailed toward our next stop, Crete.