We had 2 nights at Sounio south of Athens to have some beach time before we left for the UK. However UK is currently actually hotter at 33 degrees. Sounio is 27 and breezy.
We had a full day on the very comfortable sun loungers on the beach with the 2400 year old temple above us. This is the best beach we have seen in Greece – mostly sand with crystal clear water. There is a row of buoys marking the swimming area where boats are not allowed to enter. There are some sea grass beds and a few fish – but disappointingly not too many – not as many as on Bundeena reef.
There was one cheeky fish with a black spot on its tail that chased us around. Then some of his mates joined until there were about 7 of them.
Back on the beach we read about the history of the temples of Poseidon and Athena above us – a bit surreal.

We enjoyed relaxing and reading our books.
We were so relaxed we couldn’t be bothered going out for dinner so had another lovely meal in the hotel. Cod and vegetable soup for me and sea bass for Glenn – all very good.

Next morning after breakfast we were mostly packed up for our pickup at 12 – luckily when checkout is. We went to the beach for a final swim. Alexis our funny and very informative taxi driver from Athens Taxi Wagons took us to the airport. He covered all sorts of topics including how Mike had found a place to stay 10 minutes from the airport that Alexis knew nothing about in his 30 years of driving taxis. We also heard all about how he likes to cook and uses the AMC cooking system – very expensive!

We were soon dropped off and then had to go through the interminable non-EU passport queue for leaving the EU. They are capturing fingerprints of nonbiometric passport holders – which is not us. We had been in it for about 30 minutes and were half way to the passport officer when we found a side exit for UK passports – that also accepted Australian since they are biometric. We were through!

We then had a nice flight and were picked up from the airport by my university friend Helen. She had been there very early as there was no traffic as the schools are off and people are working from home due to the heatwave.

We sat in the garden having a good catch up before getting a washing hung out. We had a nice salad dinner and then watched World Cup football – Ecuador beat Germany. I went to bed at 11pm – a very late 1am in Athens.