Day 23: Driving to the beach

Trip

Greece 2022

Location

Milos 🇬🇷

Date

September 18, 2022

Milos is known for its beautiful beaches all around the island. Milos is also very much not known for its public transit. Putting these two facts together led us to an inescapable conclusion that if we don’t want to swim in the port we’ll need to rent personal transport.

The two top-rated breakfast restaurants are conveniently located next to each other. We elected to have breakfast a couple of feet to the left of yesterday’s breakfast and sit down at Milors. They did breakfast of toasts and yogourt well. We’ve also learned that in Milos, you put honey and cinnamon on yogourt for some unexplained reason. Either that or the two restaurants share the same cinnamon obsessed cook.

We went for the world first of renting a car by showing up at the local Europcar rental and asking for a car for the day. No booking, no calling first, just showing up there like animals. The rental agent did take it in stride, offered us a very nice car at less than we paid for the wreck in Santorini. The only downside was that it was a manual transmission, requiring a skill I haven’t used in more than five years.

It turned out that driving standard is like riding a bike, you don’t forget it in five years. The ten kilometres or so through the city and to the beach went flawlessly. We parked at Fyriplaka, one of the more than seventy beach options we had, and went to do laps between the beach and water.

Unbeknownst to us, when the winds are prevailing from the south or southwest, Fyriplaka gets decent size waves. Doing laps in the sea with half-meter waves was a learning experience. I learned that I suck at it mostly, but I learned and will try to do better next time.

We returned the car around 18:00 to the surprise of our car rental that was expecting us to return at their closing time (20:30). It was somewhat baffling for them that we asked for a day rental and didn’t plan to use it the full 24 hours, returning the car the same day instead. On top of that, we were crazy enough to return it ahead of the last possible second. Undoubtedly we’re strange people.

Dinner was planed at Yankos. Based on reviews I expected it to be an actual sit down restaurant but turned out to be more of a takeout place: there are a couple of tables outside of you don’t mind the traffic around and the steel chairs and tables. After a day of relaxing I was looking for something more of a relaxed meal to round up the day. We opted for Nostos Seafood Experience. Any restaurant that describes itself as an experience will be pricey and will either be good food or awkward. We were happy to discover that Nostos went for good food experience with some presentation embellishments. A great note to end a beach day on.