Welcome back to Cruisin’ Clara!
This is the beginning of a series of blog posts about my J-term trip to Greece and Turkey in January of 2024. I meant to write these posts sooner, but time slipped away from me… again. Better late than never?!
For those of you who don’t know, I was fortunate enough to study abroad through St. Olaf College yet again for an entire month. I traveled with a group of about 25 other students, a St. Olaf professor and his wife. The class was called “Religion and Empire”, so in addition to visiting archaeological sites, museums, etc., I spent a lot of time analyzing the New Testament, learning about the Roman Empire, and participating in daily class discussions. Hence the reason I did not have time to write these blog posts back in January 🙂
I’m sure you have many questions about what this trip was like… Where did we stay? Where did we travel to? How did we get around? What did a typical day look like? What was it like traveling with a group of 20+ people?
I’m hoping to answer most of these questions in this post. The remaining posts in this series will contain some of my favorite memories from the trip!
Itinerary
Let’s start with a map of the places we traveled to throughout the month.
- Athens
- Eleusis
- Corinth
- Nafplio
- Epidaurus
- Olympia
- Delphi
- Thermopylae
- Kalambaka
- Veria
- Thessaloniki
- Kavala
- Assos
- Bergama
- Izmir
- Kusadasi
- Ephesus
- Miletus
- Didyma
- Sardis
- Pamukkale
- Istanbul
I think it’s safe to say we covered a LOT of ground!
Hotels
We did not stay overnight in every one of these cities. However, we did stay in a total of 11 hotels including:
- Hotel Herodion (Athens, Greece) – 5 nights
- Pension Marianna (Nafplio, Greece) – 1 night
- Hotel Europa (Olympia, Greece) – 2 nights
- Hotel Leto (Delphi, Greece) – 2 nights
- Hotel Divani Meteora (Kalambaka, Greece) – 1 night
- City Hotel (Thessaloniki, Greece) – 2 nights
- Hotel Galaxy (Kavala, Greece) – 1 night
- Hotel Kervansaray (Assos, Turkey) – 2 nights
- Hotel Charisma (Kusadasi, Turkey) – 4 nights
- Lycus River Hotel (Pamukkale, Turkey) – 2 nights
- Hotel Azade Premier (Istanbul, Turkey) – 5 nights
Overall, I thought the hotels were wonderful. A couple of them stuck out to me the most, though. Hotel Herodion in Athens had hot tubs with an incredible view of the Parthenon. Every night, my friends and I would sit in the hot tub and chat for hours while taking in the incredible views. Hotel Charisma was another favorite of mine. It was seafront, meaning we could jump in the Aegean whenever we had even the smallest amount of free time. It also had an AMAZING buffet and several saunas, pools, and spa rooms. The Lycus River Hotel was also a fun place to stay because it had a thermal spa.
Roommates
Every time we switched hotels, we also changed roommates. This system was a bit stressful at first —mostly because we were all trying to balance having fun with doing our schoolwork — but I am actually very grateful that we had this system. It made it much easier to get to know my classmates!
Travel
Throughout the trip, we had two tour guides — Gabrielle and Gulín — that traveled with us throughout Greece and Turkey, respectively. They kept us on schedule, organized & adapted our itinerary, and gave us tours at many of the sites. We also had two bus drivers (one for Greece and another for Turkey) that stayed with us throughout the trip. Any time we moved locations, —with the exception of our flight from Denizili to Istanbul— we took the bus. It was a very nice coach bus with reclining seats and HUGE windows, which made long stretches of bus time much more enjoyable. I spent most of my time on the bus listening to heavy metal while I slept peacefully with my fuzzy blanket, teddy bear, and pillow 😌. Occasionally, I stayed up too late the night before and had to do my reading/reflection last-minute on the bus.
A Typical Day
A typical day for us included waking up early to travel to our next destination, touring an archaeological site/museum/place of worship, listening to my classmates’ declamations (mine was at Thermopylae!), some free time in the afternoon, 1-2 hours of class in the evening, dinner (usually together), and homework. I often stayed up late playing games and talking with my friends, so I mostly slept ~5 hours per night. See why I enjoyed the bus so much now?!
Group Travel
As you all probably know from my previous posts, I LOVE traveling alone. I went into this trip knowing how much I enjoy solo travel, yet curious about whether I would thrive in a group travel setting. I will say, the two are very different experiences. When I traveled alone, I had the freedom to choose what I did each day. If I was tired and needed a day to relax, I could simply cancel my plans. On this trip, most of our day was scheduled for us. Some days, I reached my limit on how much information I could take in but continued on with the tours anyway. Other days, I wished I had a little bit more time to explore the cities I was in. However, I think that traveling with a strict itinerary really pushed me out of my comfort zone & made me appreciate every opportunity that I had throughout the trip.
Knowing that I can still enjoy learning (about something completely different than my area of study, which is chemistry) even after a full 8 hour day of tours is motivating. Even when I think I can’t keep going, I can.
Having a limited amount of time to explore on my own also forced me to decide which experiences were most important to me. For example, I remember waking up at the break of dawn in Nafplio to hike up the nearly 1000 stairs of Palamidi Fortress.
Most importantly, this trip fostered life-long friendships with people that I may not have otherwise ever known. As I mentioned earlier, I was a chemistry major meaning most of my classes consisted of other students in STEM. On this trip, however, many of my classmates were religion, English, and political science majors. At the time, I was also a senior. I had friends that I consistently hung out with and knew quite a few people in my class, but most of the other faces on campus were unfamiliar to me. Aside from a few seniors, this trip mostly consisted of sophomores and juniors. This gave me the perfect opportunity to make friends outside of my year.
For the entire month of January, I spent 24/7 with the others on this trip. On Day 1, most of them were strangers to me. By the time the last day rolled around and we were ready to go our separate ways, I truly could not imagine going a day without them.
So yeah… this trip was absolutely life-changing and I would 100% do it over again if I could.
What’s next?
Throughout the next few blog posts, you will travel along side of me to relive some of my favorite moments from my trip to Greece & Turkey: swimming in the Aegean Sea, making cookies & playing basketball at an organic orange farm in Nafplio, hiking a mountain in Delphi, and navigating the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul to name a few. You will inevitably get to know some of my closest friends from the trip, see plenty of photos taken by yours truly, and (as always) be thoroughly entertained. 😉
Until next time,
Clara