Toddler vs Airplane, Round 2

Ok, deep breath. Here we go. It's the moment of truth. The 24 hours that could make us forget every beautiful sunset, mouthwatering baklava, and charming host we've had in this country. It's time to get back on an airplane.

A common refrain this month has been, "Travel days are tough." Ferries, planes, trains, cars, it doesn't matter. It's hard to move two kids across the world or across the room. And constantly reminding ourselves that has helped us keep our sanity at several points along this trip.

There are travel days, and there are Travel Days. Today was a TRAVEL DAY. The next 24 hours would include taxis, trains, brief hotel stays, and of course, another trans-Atlantic plane ride. We can do this. We can do this.

But first, breakfast. Our last morning on Sifnos was one for the books. Mimi woke up pretty early, but I wanted to at least let Aimee and Quinn keep sleeping. So I took Mimi for a walk around our neighborhood. We didn't have any particular destination in mind, so we followed the sound of a rooster crowing to see where it would lead us. We ended up in a little backyard farm with pomegranate and olive trees, roosters, rabbits, goats, and of course chickens. This place really is paradise.

As a matter of fact, Grael's dad, a professional travel writer, considers Greece to be his favorite destination on the planet. And he's seen it all.

On our way back, Mimi grabbed a bundle of grapes from a vine hanging in front of the restaurant next to our hotel, completely unaware that this is not normal. Most people don't get to eat fresh grapes while watching the sun come up over the Aegean Sea, and she will remember none of this.

When the rest of the gang woke up, we walked over to the cafe next door for our last bowl of fresh yogurt and honey. Even mixed with a few tears, it's still the best breakfast on the planet.

After several rounds of goodbyes, it was time to get in our taxi back to the port. Like everything on this island, the taxi situation is unbearably charming. There are ten taxis on the entire island. Not ten taxi companies, ten individual people with a number on the side of their car. Their cell phone numbers are plastered all over the island, and you work your way through the list until you find one that can pick you up. Nicos isn't picking up? Try Marcos. Marcos is having lunch? Give Nina a call.

The limited number of taxis generally isn't a problem, since the island is so small. But on ferry mornings, half the island is either coming or going. We had a hard time finding anyone that was available to come all the way to our little corner of the island, but we finally secured a ride with our tenth phone call, not that getting stuck here would have been the worst thing.

[Side note: Nona, Grael, and Conrad actually did get stuck in Sifnos. A big storm shut down all ferry traffic to the island a few days after we left. Our friends "had" to stay on the island three days longer than planned, and just barely made it to their flight home. The had been planning on spending a couple of days in Athens before flying home, but it looks like the Acropolis will have to wait, yet again.]

But the weather wasn't a problem for us. Cloudless skies and crisp blue water followed us all the way to the port, and we didn't have a great answer for why we were leaving this island.

It's hard to take a decent photo from the back seat of a moving taxi, but this was our view on the way out of town.

Looking out at the Aegean, it's easy to see how how a foundational human civilization was born here. There's so much raw, emotional power that comes from seeing nothing but the sea in all directions. It makes you want to be part of something bigger than yourself. It also makes you never want to go home.

But our vacation wasn't quite over yet. The only time we could arrange a taxi was at 10 am, and our ferry didn't leave until 1 pm. So we got to the port town with plenty of time to eat yet more amazing food and watch a couple other ferries come and go.

After a casual lunch (and three gyros for the road), we successfully carried out our last ferry on-boarding without leaving any children or luggage behind. No small task.

The voyage to Athens was relatively easy. The weather was nice, the espresso bar was open, and Mimi was napping. Perfect conditions.

Nicos, our taxi driver from two weeks prior, was at the port waiting for us as promised. With a two year old on my shoulders and a rolling suitcase that no longer rolled, I couldn't have been happier to see him. He helped with our bags and whisked us away from the busting cacophony of a very busy port.

Once we cleared the port, Nicos asked me which hotel we were going to. I gave him the name of the one I had booked online. And as soon as Nicos turned to me, I knew where we were going.

"Oh, really? You're staying there?" He said, "No, no that's not a good hotel."

Crap. I immediately realized that I had booked us into a hotel in the not-so-great neighborhood we had accidentally wandered into earlier in the trip.

"Really, Nicos? No good?"

"Well, the hotel is fine, but the neighborhood is bad. Just watch your bags and don't walk around at night."

We called a few other hotels as we made our way downtown, but even with Nicos' connections, we couldn't find an alternative. It was a Saturday night, and Athens was at capacity. Looks like we would be holing up in our hotel room for the night.

The security guard out front (first clue) helped us bring our bags in, and the check in process was a breeze. Like Nicos said, the hotel really was nice. Looking around the lobby, the hotel catered to two groups of people: online shoppers that didn't know any better, and people that just needed a place to stay before they flew out the next day. We were both. But I was really glad that we had spent the majority of our time in Athens at Dimitris' apartment.

That evening, both the desk clerk and the restaurant waiter commented on how good my Greek was. That must be how they pad their online reviews.

My Greek is terrible, by the way. But by that point in the trip, I had learned to predict the question flow. They could have asked me my blood type, and I would have replied, "Thank you. He's two months old, she's two years old, and we're from the United States."

Thankfully, the hotel restaurant was totally adequate, and we had a decent meal while Mimi watched her first soccer match on the TV at the bar. There are worse ways to spend a night locked inside of your hotel.

Our room was the typical European capital city hotel room, in that you could reach from the porch to the toilet if you laid on your bed a certain way. Not ideal when traveling with two small children, but with a super early flight the next morning, it really didn't matter. Exacerbating our sleeplessness, the hotel didn't have a crib. We brought a tiny pack and play for Quinn, but this was a terrible night to teach Mimi how to sleep on a real bed for the first time. We tried putting the mattress on the floor, reading books, singing songs, you name it. But without fail, she would be up walking the room within three seconds of me crawling into bed. Every time.

After a couple hours of trying to get Mimi to go to sleep (complicated by her losing her mind in an overtired stupor because she couldn't figure out how to breastfeed a stuffed doll), I was able to get her to fall asleep by laying a sheet on the floor and making a bed for the two of us right on the ground. I can no longer feel either of my feet, but getting whatever sleep we got was worth it.

As promised, Nicos was waiting for us at 4 am outside of our hotel. He asked how our hotel stay was, and I told him what he already knew. The room was decent, and we saw nothing else. We continued with as much taxi small talk as I was able to muster uncaffeinated at 4 am. Nicos told me that he had been working all night, and this was his 25th hour of driving. That perked me up quite nicely as I now watched his eyelids like a hawk. There was one questionable low-speed swerve that quickened my pulse a bit, but we made it safely along the freeway. If the swerve was a ploy to get me to tip well once we arrived, it worked. I was thrilled to have my family on solid ground.

The only (and I mean only) benefit of a sleep-deprived toddler is that she was too tired to run off at the airport. So we had a few peaceful minutes to work out the inevitable check in issues that come along with flying with two children. Quinn was the only one of us that was fully ticketed all the way home. I'd have to talk with our airline in Houston to get the rest of us home. The ticket agent apologized profusely, but Houston was close enough. I could figure it out from there.

And just like that, we were back on an international tarmac with a sleep deprived toddler. We're doing it.

Don't worry, we didn't forget Quinn. But we felt pretty irresponsible leaving the herd of passengers to take a picture on the tarmac. There was no time to set up a decent shot. But the picture does capture Mimi's emotional state accurately. Sort of an adorable zombie.

Aimee and I vowed to remind ourselves how nice the trip was in about 5 hours when the inevitable breakdown would come.

Our first flight from Athens to Frankfurt was relatively easy. I kept Mimi busy while consuming as much coffee as the flight attendants would give me. Aimee tended to Quinn's bodily functions while doing the same.

I tried with everything I had to get Mimi to fall asleep on the plane. I wanted her to get enough sleep to keep it together on the next flight. And, possibly just to taunt me, Mimi finally fell asleep literally as the wheels touched down in Frankfurt. But I was just happy she was sleeping.

As an aside, traveling with a toddler (and life with a toddler for that matter) is all about the present moment. Survival. Back when I traveled without kids, I had all my flight number written down, knew the layout of each airport, and looked up each airline's phone number. Now I'm just happy to get all four of us to the airport. I had a vague memory of our flight details, but nowhere near what I would have liked. Specifically, I had absolutely no idea how tight our connection in Frankfurt would be. As our plane touched down, I looked at our Frankfurt to Houston boarding passes and tapped my watch. That can't be right. What's the time difference in Germany? Not as much as I would have liked. We had about 45 minutes to gather our stuff, disembark, clear EU Passport Control, change terminals, and get on our plane. Oh, and did I mention that Mimi was still out cold?

Not one to tempt fate, I didn't want to risk waking Mimi up. I put on my backpack, helped Aimee with her bag, and carried Mimi--carseat and all--as we ran through the Frankfurt airport. Our first stop was an airline employee that was directing everyone to their connecting flights. She asked me which flight we were on. "Lufthansa 440 to Houston" I told her.

"Oh. Hmm. Nope. No, you're not going to make it." She said while looking at her tablet. "Well...hmm. No. Not going to make it. Well...maybe, actually. Looks like there was a delay. Just hurry."

Not needing to hear that again, Aimee and I continued our sprint through the airport, one sleeping kid bouncing along with each of us.

Next stop: Enhanced security. Post 9/11, passengers on international flights to the US have to go through an extra round of security. It's the same procedure as the non-enhanced regular security we went through in Athens (metal detectors, xrays, etc.) but this time, certain travelers were selected for additional security screening. And guess who got picked? The sweating, panting 6' 5" guy that hasn't shaved in three weeks. I probably could have seen that coming.

I pushed back just enough to let the hapless airport employee know that I had a tight connection to make, but not so much that I would need to change my flight from inside of a German prison cell. I think the fact that I had a sleeping two year old laying in a carseat across my arms probably knocked down my threat level a little bit, and I made it through the additional screening without much more than a peek inside my bags and shoes.

Third stop: Passport Control. I used my sleeping toddler like a backstage pass, and walked us straight through to the front of the line. "Thank you, sorry, tight connection, thank you, sorry, tight connection."

We gave our passports to the agent, and tried to look like people who don't need additional questioning.

I always get a kick out of straight-faced immigration agents who look at a baby's passport, furrow their brow, look at the baby, back to the passport, baby, passport. "Mmm hmm. Yep, that's him." Please. It's a one inch photo of an infant. They all look the same. But I appreciate you making the effort.

This post is already going a little too long, but I need to digress for a minute. It's worth your time. When we got Mimi's passport, we took her to the passport office in Tucson to complete her application. We spent about an hour trying to get a photo of three-week-old Mimi with both of her eyes open at the same time. Nearly impossible. So with Quinn, we wised up (second kid, and all). I looked up the State Department requirements for passport photos, and we spent an afternoon having a makeshift photo session on our kitchen floor. This is what we came up with.

You're welcome. I told you it was worth your time.

I think the only type of human being on our planet that can look at this photo without smiling is a German immigration officer. Nothing, not even a wink. Come on man, this is amazing. You've got to validate that.

But there wasn't much time to perseverate on the agent's lack of humor. We still had a flight to catch. We ran through the terminal and got stopped at yet one more passport check. It's hard to get upset at a process that is meant to keep us safe, but it's not hard to get a bit of heartburn from it.

Convinced we missed our flight, we ran the rest of the way to the gate and found a line of people waiting out front. I've never been so happy about a flight delay! And somehow, miraculously, Mimi stayed asleep through all of it!

Although, I must have been a little too loud with my celebration. Kudos to Aimee for her amazing photo timing. When she started to take photo, I was looking at the camera and smiling. But in the interval between taking the camera out, and capturing the photo, Mimi started to stir. The moment Aimee captured was me panicking, shushing, and swearing all at the same time. Shhhhhhhhh...it.

We may or may not have delicately slipped our child a dissolving Benadryl tablet immediately after this photo was taken. Yes, right in the middle of the airport. We felt a little guilty, until we remembered our flight out here.

So with an awake but dazed toddler (and a stirring infant), we shuffled on to our last 10 hour flight until they're both at least in middle school.

Our bumpy check-in process back in Athens resulted in the ticket agent pitying us and upgrading our seats to a bulkhead row. There's absolutely no better way to fly with children.

Delightful.

That photo is a bit of selective editing, and the calm lasted about three minutes. But the flight home was still far, far easier than the flight out. For starters we were on a double decker Airbus 380, so Mimi had a legitimate staircase to climb up and down whenever she needed to burn off some energy. Granted, we won no parenting awards by letting our wobbly-footed two year old climb up and down stairs on a moving airplane, but we stayed close, and she survived. Desperate times.

There were no medical emergencies, the meal was a pretty decent bratwurst, and Mimi even slept for a few hours. We had a low bar for that flight, but it was about as easy as we could have asked for.

We landed in Houston with sanity intact, and worked our way through US customs and immigration. The only bit of excitement was an impromptu passport checkpoint that was set up in the international baggage claim area. We saw CBP agents looking concerned as the quickly paced the area, but it sounds like they found who they were looking for. Thankfully it wasn't the sweating, panting 6' 5" guy that hasn't shaved in three weeks.

We rechecked our bags to Tucson, and worked our way through the airport food court. We now had about three hours to kill, but that was when the other toddler-sized shoe dropped. Mimi alternated between fits of limitless energy, and five-second power naps on any horizontal surface she could find.

This was going to be rough.

After about an hour of emotional rollercoastering, I found myself getting disproportionally upset with Mimi's obstinance and occasional breakdowns. We were all going on hour 28 without any real sleep, so everyone was kind of loosing their mind.

I became a much better parent when I realized that Mimi had extremely little control over her emotions. She's exhausted, Benadryl woozy, and of course, still a two year old. Mimi was everyone's drunk friend from college. Keep your shoes on, Paul. Paul, please keep your shoes on. Come on now, Paul. You know this. No, Paul, over here. Over here, Paul. Oh Paul, did you just pee your pants?

But I was impressed with how well she was keeping it together, given the circumstances. And those circumstances got infinitely better when Mimi saw her old friend, choo choo!

I think the lesson here is that there quite a bit of joy to be found in riding the inter-terminal train if you know how to look for it. It took a couple of laps, but I eventually put down my phone, stopped reading the news, and embraced her wisdom.

Traveling with kids is equal parts harrowing and delightful. Sometimes. Depending on the day. I probably would be writing a different conclusion if this trip ended after our layover in the Munich airport three weeks ago. But now that I'm comfortably back in my own home, with my children napping, and my feet up on the couch, I can take a more sentimental approach.

Say, for instance, if we didn't have a kid that we were actively trying to rescue from a breakdown at the Houston airport, we would, ourselves, have needed rescuing. Not metaphorically, but literally. As we were waiting for the elevator to take us down to our gate, we saw a huge fire truck come racing across the tarmac. We couldn't quite see where the crew ran to, but as we balanced two kids, three bags, and a stroller on the escalator (after the overhead speaker announced that the elevator was out of service), we realized that the fire department was working on extracting the people who got in the elevator ahead of us.

If we weren't traveling with kids, we wouldn't have bonded with the five people sitting in our immediate vicinity on the incredibly small plane that our daughter was losing her mind on. Thankfully, they were all parents.

And best of all, if we weren't traveling with kids, I would have wasted this lovely sunrise by sleeping in past 4 am.

At least she's cute.

But despite the sleep deprivation and manic plane rides, it couldn't have been more worth it. The scenery was only outdone by the food, and the people were delightful. But the real joy was getting to spend so much time with our kids while they're still young. We're constantly reminded about how quickly they grow up, and we were so grateful to get to experience this stage with them.

Especially with this as the backdrop.

We're really lucky.

Last days on the islands

Our last few days on Sifnos were delightful. We spent them wandering from restaurant to restaurant, briefly pausing our eating every now and then to visit some spectacular beaches. In other words, it was the perfect vacation.

This place, man. Where do I begin? Sifnos is a sleepy island just the right distance away from the traditional tourist circuit. There are only a few small hotels on the island, but it's not hard to find a room. And there are only a few restaurants here, but they are all incredible (even by Greece’s high standards). Even better, we generally have the places to ourselves, aside from the owner and his/her kids eating in the corner.

Let me tell you, it’s a uniquely wonderful experience to bring three children to an exotic top-tier restaurant, and see that they’re not the only ones there. I’m probably a bit more self-conscious than I need to be when taking my kids to a restaurant, but seeing the owner's own kids playing with toy cars underneath a table in the corner is uniquely relaxing. I know they'll understand if my two year old doesn't make it through ninety minutes and seven courses.

As any parent knows, you get about 10 seconds to grab a #humblebrag picture of your toddler eating a plate full of vegetables before she devolves into an overactive mashup of high drama and standup comedy.

Social media:

Reality:

And Mimi wasn't the only one struggling. Conrad's confused circadian rhythms generally knocked him out a few minutes after the first course.

If you look closely at Nona's lap, this still qualifies as a family photo. Parenting superwin.

The entire island was just as relaxed as the restaurants that we were eating in. Sifnos is a sleepy, undiscovered gem that makes even Milos feel busy by comparison. But part of the charming sleepiness was because of the time of year we went there. September is the shoulder season on the Greek islands. Most tourists are back at work or school, and the few remaining ones (the upshot of having kids under five) get the islands to themselves.

In addition to the empty restaurants, the beaches were wide open. Maybe one in twenty lounge chairs had somebody in it, and these are some of the prettiest beaches on the planet. It was like living in a Corona commercial. Except with kids. So nothing like a Corona commercial. But beautiful, nonetheless.

Even the city maps were charming. They were hand painted on wood boards every few blocks.

And speaking of charming, this is what a delivery truck looks like on an island of two thousand people.

Today’s run: three apples, seven paper clips, and a single shoelace for the butcher's left boot.

But charming and undiscovered does have a few drawbacks. The most obvious (at least to a doctor and a nurse traveling with their small children) was the dearth of medical services. When we arrived, I noticed a poster announcing that the island was raising money to buy a medical transport helicopter. The closest hospital is on Milos, so people with medical emergencies need to wait for a helicopter to arrive from there before they can be transported.

I did see a sign for a small medical clinic, but the building didn’t look occupied. Fortunately, we didn’t need to find out. Towards the end of our time on Sifnos, Mimi got a bit of a GI bug and briefly developed a low-grade fever. But thankfully she didn’t need much medical intervention beyond a few extra hugs and some underwear changes.

The lifeguard situation was similar. There are no actual emergency personnel on any of the beaches, just a few lifeboats dotting the coastline. I presume that villagers would use the boats to rescue any swimmers or boaters in trouble. But we never had the opportunity to see them in use, and that was fine by us.

Well, that's not entirely true. One afternoon, we saw somebody using a lifeboat to pull a giant plastic swan from one end of the beach to another. Apparently, lack of floating scenery qualifies as an emergency out here.

But who am I to judge? Maybe the secret to longevity isn't having a robust emergency services program, it's spending the afternoon towing a giant floating bird. And I'm mostly serious when I say that. This has been the way of life on Sifnos for hundreds of years, and the residents seem to be getting along just fine.

Speaking of the island’s history, Sifnos has long been a major pottery supplier to the region. The clay soil on the island is apparently excellent for dishes and bakeware. In fact, the pottery industry is still quite active, and there’s a ceramic workshop right next to our hotel.

You know my daughter, and you know where this is going.

Ever-moving Mimi gave me the opportunity to support the local pottery industry by knocking one of the bowls off of its drying rack. It was still soft, but not so soft that it didn’t shatter into a dozen pieces when it hit the ground.

This being Greece, the potter was extremely understanding when he saw that a child was involved. He wouldn’t let me give him money for the bowl, and my Greek isn't good enough to explain to him that he’d actually be doing me a favor if he took my money. Broken bowl, five euros, end of transaction. But instead, we had a broken bowl, followed by “No, please! She’s a child!” followed by guilt, shame, and the related emotions of parenthood. So, unnamed friend who recently got married, I hope you enjoy your new ceramic kitchenware. Mimi says, "You're welcome."

And this will be a surprise to no one, but five days goes by really quickly when you’re on an island paradise with good friends.

By the end of our time on Sifnos, Conrad and Mimi were back on a reasonable sleep schedule. So Nona, Grael, Aimee, and I finally got that drink on the back porch we had been dreaming about.

We’re really lucky.

Next stop, paradise. Again.

We tearfully checked out of our Milos hotel on Monday morning. In Sasha’s case, literally. She’d cried actual, sincere tears at the thought of Mimi leaving. And although we’d like to think that our kids are particularly charming, I think Sasha’s natural warmth and hospitality played the major role. We’ve experienced so much genuine, heartfelt kindness at every step of our journey though this country.

And it was time to move that journey forward. Our next stop was Sifnos, a neighboring island of Milos, and an hour ferry ride away.

As an epilogue to my last post, we saw a poster in the Milos ferry terminal rallying support to have the Aphrodite (aka Venus) de Milo returned to its home island.

This an interesting issue playing out in real time, and it raises a lot of ethical questions that I didn’t fully appreciate as a college student walking through the national museums of previous colonial powers. The full story is probably for more complex than I can understand after a quick vacation here, but my immediate gut-level sympathies are definitely with the host countries requesting their artifacts back.

But I didn’t have much time to ponder the ethics of captured artifacts as I chased a two year old around a working port.

She has spent the week looking at such large ferry boats that she now calls the Greek Navy battlecruiser that docked the night before a “baby boat.”

I don’t think “cute” was the look they were going for by placing a long gun up front, but my two year old thinks they nailed it.

A few minutes later, the ferry pulled in, and our daughter continued her charm offensive by running up and down the port yelling, “Yeah! Our boat’s here! Yeah!” It brought the house down.

We’ve been watching these ferries come in all week, and the speed with which they dock, unload, and reload never ceases to amaze us. It’s astounding. It takes the crew maybe 15 minutes to jump from the partially opened loading ramp, tie the boat to the dock, unload a hundred people, and then wave a couple dozen cars off the boat. And in this case, a full-size passenger bus as well. And then they do it all again in reverse.

We did our part to shuffle onto the boat in a timely fashion, repeating our head count of two adults, two kids, three bags, and four baklavas at several points along the way.

But we made it on board without any trouble. In fact, the crew remembered our kids (we’re no longer surprised by that), smiled, and waved us through pretty quickly.

This boat ride was quick—only an hour journey between islands. And thankfully this was our shortest ferry ride of the trip. The choppy water was rocking the boat quite a bit, and even the crew looked a little pekid.

At one point, I looked out the window and saw a sailboat getting tossed around far worse. I was happy to 1) Not be on that boat, and 2) Get my annual reminder that, no, buying a sailboat would not be a good idea.

But we made it to Sifnos without any vomit coming out of anyone who isn’t already supposed to be spitting up after each feed. And we were kindly rewarded.

I didn’t think this would have been possible, but Sifnos is somehow even prettier than Milos. Like it’s neighbor, Sifnos is a volcanic island, but this one is far more mountainous. Whereas Milos is pretty flat for several kilometers along the water, Sifnos goes straight from coastline to hilltop.

Our friends Nona and Grael (and Grael’s parents) had arrived in Athens the day before, and their ferry landed on the island about an hour before ours did. They were as exhausted as we were after flying 24 hours with a two year old, and they melted into their hotel room as we made our way across the island to meet up with them. One extremely-needed power nap later, Mimi and Conrad were ready to reunite on the beach.

We were just as excited to see Nona, Grael, and Grael’s parents.

Or at least Grael in this case. Looking back, I don’t have any photos of all six of us adults together for at least the first 36 hours, as two or three of us were continuously rotating off duty for a survival nap.

The toddlers continued to catch up over dinner, as the rest of us realized how much harder it was going to be to keep up with a couple of two year olds than it was to keep up with a couple of barely-mobile one year olds like we did in Viet Nam.

You can see Aimee on the edge of that photo making sure that Mimi and Conrad didn’t rile each other up enough to jump from the restaurant into the water. The energy of combined toddlers is exponentially greater than what they can come with on their own.

After dinner, the kids went to bed while the parents had a chance to catch up over a bottle of wine under the stars as we listened to the waves crashing along the shore.

Just kidding. That’s not even remotely true. We continued to chase around a couple of two year olds well into the night, as one of them was still on Mountain Standard Time, and the other one was drawing from his power source. But I’m sure someone on this island slept well that night.

Awake or sleeping, we couldn’t have been happier to spend the next few days together in yet another corner of paradise. At least one of our kids knew how to properly enjoy it.

We’ll miss you, Milos

Our last few days in Milos were essentially highlight reels of the first. We spent the mornings at our favorite beach down the street, and went back (and back) to our favorite restaurants.

Our kids have become local celebrities, and get kisses blown to them everywhere we go from locals and tourists alike.

Aimee and I had a similar thought in Viet Nam, but traveling with kids probably opens more doors than it closes. We’re automatically in with the locals, and have an immediate bond with other traveling families.

Finding ourselves with the type of open afternoon we’d spend at the park in Athens, we took a Milos approach to entertaining a toddler. No metro on the island, but there is a bus that drives up and down the stunning coastline.

Mimi was enthralled, and exclaimed several times, “We’re on a bus! We’re on a bus!” If it were always this easy.

And there isn’t a zoo, but there is a world-class beach carved into the volcanic rock.

Sarakiniko Beach was too beautiful and too unique to only go once, so we spent yesterday evening soaking it up one more time.

To our surprise, we weren’t the only family there. Mimi met two year olds from Spain, France, and Israel, while Quinn received coos in at least five languages.

We head to Sifnos tomorrow to meet up with Nona, Grael, and their son (more on that later), so this is our final night on Milos. We’re really going to miss this place.

Some stray observations:

1) Mimi’s coordination hasn’t caught up yet with her desire to run on cobblestone streets. But I don’t think any of the scars will be permanent.

2) Receipts are a big deal around here. Restaurant servers really make a big show of handing you a printed receipt, and every business has a big sign in it saying that you don’t need to pay if you don’t get a receipt. Further, all of the cash registers are hooked up to some type of networked monitoring device. My guess is that all of that is tied to the national debt restructuring. Part of the Greek economic crisis stemmed from a persistent decrease in tax revenue. Politicians said that the citizens were ducking their obligations, while the citizens said that the politicians squandered what they did receive. I’m no economist, but common sense tells me that it’s probably a combination of both. Either way, everyone can agree that taxes on tourist revenue are low hanging fruit, and should definitely be collected. Even the tourists feel that way. If a few cents of every gyro purchase is needed to keep this place going, sign me up to help. I’ll even toss in an extra baklava or two. You know, for economic diplomacy and all that. Just doing my part.

3) The Venus de Milo is housed in the Louvre, after being obtained under disputed circumstances. And equally priceless pieces of the Acropolis are housed in the British Museum, while Greece’s official requests to have them returned have so far been fruitless. Greece has gone through millennia of ups and downs, and unfortunately didn’t have a particularly strong central government during the heyday of colonialism. With no one to protect the country’s artifacts, countless relics were looted or destroyed by visiting ships from all over the world. But this isn’t just a recent problem. The author of the book I keep referencing makes several wistful claims about how much more we’d know about the ancient Greeks if this library or that school wasn’t sacked by the Romans, Persians, Ottomans, Venetians, etc. But one interesting and ironic anecdote was about us actually knowing more because of a looted castle. A great deal of what we do know about the very early ancient Greeks came from a set of clay tablets that were preserved by a castle fire that occurred nearly three thousand years ago. Before kilns were invented, clay tablets were essential ancient scratch paper. So the set that was preserved gave historians one of the earliest looks into early European society.

[By the way, that link about the Acropolis pieces in the British Museum is worth clicking. It’s a characteristically bizarre story about modern Greek politics involving the far left and far right forming a coalition government, the World Court, and a famous international human rights lawyer who happens to be married to George Clooney. Nuts.]

4) The early leaders of both Ancient Greece and our own country prized individual freedom above all else while also owning slaves. I don’t know how to reconcile that.

5) Don’t worry, my beach daydreaming hasn’t just been about looted artifacts and tax revenue. I’ve also been thinking about these:

This pastry shop is about 100 yards from our hotel. We’ve gone there at least once daily since we arrived on the island. And then usually go back again once more after the kids go to bed.

This was last night’s decadence, an ice cream waffle that disappeared in about 7 seconds.

The photo is poorly exposed because we were eating it in the dark. We snuck out to the alleyway behind our hotel room, and ate it there because we didn’t want to wake up Mimi. Not so much because we didn’t want her to have any, but more because we didn’t want to split it three ways. We’re not proud. But we’re not really ashamed, either.

We’ll miss you, Milos.

Road signs, vipers, and democracy

We rented our car for two days, so we still had one day left to explore the island. We thought we’d go in a more urban direction, and decided to check out the historic capital city of Plaka. The drive was about 20 minutes long, past stunning coastlines and hairpin turns.

That turn wasn’t the most impressive, but I was whiteknuckling it on the ones that were, so the camera stayed in my pocket. I’m not going to lie, it felt like I was in a Bond movie. Something about sharp turns, gorgeous views, tiny cars, and road signs I can’t understand.

On Sasha’s advice, we parked outside of the city and walked up. As a rusty stick shift driver, I was very grateful not to to have to navigate the old world cobblestone streets.

Well, at least not in our car.

We, very intentionally, haven’t been making a lot of sightseeing plans. With two kids determining our amount of leisure time, seeing anything is a win. So I didn’t have much of an idea about what was in Plaka before we arrived. But from the front porch of the cafe we stopped at, we could see a Byzantine-era church and castle overlooking the city.

Both are about a thousand years old, and are essentially modern history on this island. There are several artifacts from 4,000 BC (!) showing that not only was this island inhabited, but the heart of an art-creating, pottery-making, and eventually coin-minting and parchment-writing civilization. In fact, the Milo in Venus de Milo is because the sculpture was found here. It was made around 100 BC, discovered by a local farmer in 1820, and is actually an image of Aphrodite, not Venus. But the name stuck. Tomatoes/Tomahtoes.

It’s easy to write off the Greek islands as sleepy offshoots of the mainland, but they have a rich history all of their own. They likely played a (if not the) major role in why the ancient Athenians were such a dominant force in early western society. The book I read before this trip makes a case that although a lot of the early Greek innovations were borrowed from their neighbors, the Greeks themselves were the singular inventors of democracy. The importance and significance of that development was a major advancement of human civilization, and it’s almost a cliche to say how revolutionary that was.

In all known corners of the world at the time and beforehand, community leaders, large and small, were granted their status through violence or birthright. We now take them for granted, but the thought of elections, or even civil discussions, about who should lead a community were absolutely unheard of at the time.

And how did this happen? The author makes a pretty convincing case that the coastal makeup of the country created the environment for all of the Ancient Greek advancements. The idea of a modern Greek nation-state is relatively new (less than 200 years). Previous to that, it was a loose federation of communities that spoke a common language. In ancient times, the concept of race was not well-developed, and being “Greek” simply meant believing in a common set of Greek values (individual freedom, merit-based advancement, peaceful cooperation towards common goals, appreciation of the arts, etc.). Sound familiar? There’s a reason that America’s early leaders chose Greek columns for the DC architecture.

Although the footprint of Greece (then and now) is smaller than all but 10 US states, it contains the highest ratio of coastline to landmass. As is often the case with coastal societies, the Ancient Greeks were excellent seafarers, and traded with all of their neighbors. This resulted in the constant ebb and flow of both people and ideas. Unifying such a migratory and flourishing civilization would be nearly impossible with a strong-man type monarchy, not that people didn’t try. But the governmental structure that really took hold was an open, direct democracy that allowed for multiple voices in leadership from all of the different geographical and cultural corners of early Greece.

Because the Ancient Greek population was different than ours (thousands of people vs hundreds of millions), their democracy was different, too. It was a direct democracy, meaning that Athenian citizens were chosen at random to join the Ancient Greek version of a Congress or Parlaiment. They served one year terms, and debated everything from the price of bread to whether or not they should go to war. And in addition to this, their court system had juries of hundreds of people for each case! Since there were only a few thousand people in Athens at the time, everyone had several terms in Congress and served on countless more juries. So it was nearly impossible to go about your day without direct involvement in civil leadership. Out of that, the Greek inventions of oration, persuasive writing, and drama (which was essentially persuasive writing masquerading as a fictional story) evolved. And thus western civilization developed because the early Greek people were spread out over the same Aegean Sea that I dipped my toes in earlier today. I’m not worthy.

Woah. I think this post started out at a cafe with a pretty view.

There we are.

Without much of a plan for the day, Aimee and I thought it might be nice to hike up to the castle. Our thighs were finally starting to recover from the Acropolis.

The view alone was worth the effort.

That second photo marked the end of the hike for our stroller. The cobblestone steps every six feet were doing a number on the wheels and our son. Time to strap Quinn on to mama. We hoped the stroller would still be there when we returned, but carrying it any further wasn’t an option.

Mimi didn’t mind getting a free ride, either.

Just like the Acropolis, the hike was worth it!

But we probably would have worn some better footwear if we knew what we were biting off.

By this point, you probably have a flight search going in another browser window. As you should. This place is impossibly beautiful.

The beach in the center of the last photo was the one we drove to yesterday. Delightful from any angle.

We had an early dinner after nap time, which meant that we still had about 3-4 hours remaining to engage a toddler before we all fell asleep. Where’s the metro when you need it? But what Milos lacks in choo choos, it makes up for with stunning beaches.

When I reserved our car, the rental agent gave me a map with some suggestions. She crossed off two large areas on the east and west shores. She didn’t give much of an explanation, but our guidebook says that it’s populated with the Milos Viper. I’m going to take the book’s word for it. But the agent did mark off a couple other areas that are less likely to result in a trip to the hospital.

One of them was Sarakiniko beach. Photos of the gray volcanic rock make up some of the most inconic images of the Greek islands. Which is good, since our photos don’t really do it justice.

You really just need to see it in person. Pretend I didn’t say anything about a viper.