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Greece, here we come!

After months of planning this trip (since Feb/Mar), we finally booked our flights and hotels. The flights were booked a couple of weeks ago, while the hotels were book about half an hour ago. Yay! Now, it's a real trip and not just one of those "next times." I've never been outside the U.S.; this includes Canada, although I'm not counting Puerto Rico. Okay, scratch that. I've never been outside the U.S since I was 2.

We have a pretty busy schedule. Here is a breakdown of our itinerary:

May 31st, 4pm flight, gets us to Athens, GR at 9am June 1st.
June 1st, early evening ferry takes us to our first island: Chania, Crete.
June 3rd, we drive over to Heraklion, Crete.
June 5th, we hop on an early morning ferry to Thira, Santorini.
June 8th, we take another ferry back to Athens, and finish the vacation there.
June 10th, 1pm flight back to JFK, gets us in I dont remember when.

Of course, there'll be lots of sight-seeing, eating, and beaching when we get there. And yes, in that order. Or eating throughout the day. I didn't buy any travel books, and printed everything from online sights, such as roughguides.com and frommers.com, amongst others. Both sources are great, but only as a starter. It's definitely worth it to do the research. I'm too cheap to buy the books. As this is my last semester at Baruch, and every semester we get $100 worth of print-outs from the computer lab ($.10 each), I figure I might as well put my technology fee to good use. I've never used more than $15-$20. Even now, I still have about $60-$70 left. I might buy a really cheap language book, although I did print some things out.

I'm so excited. I did some shopping and bought shorts and bathing suits. Although I already have 2 bathing suits, I figure we're not doing laundry, so 1 suit per city should be enough. As for shorts, well, I have none so I needed. Man, this trip is pricey. Although some of the hotels look nice, I think they've gotten a 2-3 star rating. The nicest hotel, and cheapest, is in the nicest place of all: Santorini. We won't be on the cliffs with all the hotels, but we'll only be about 10 mins away. Athens is expensive, and so are the cities in Crete. Especially if you want to be in a 3+ star hotel. Since we're staying a max of 2 nights, I figure crappy is fine...but not too crappy.

We'll also rent a car while we're there so we can travel all over the islands, and leave Athens. I'm actually very glad we're going at this time. This is considered low-mid season. Although they'll still be a lot of people, as like NY, it won't get as crowded as high season at the end of June to August.

Oooohh... can't wait. I'd like to say that I've started slacking because school's almost over and I'm about to graduate, but that's a lie. I've been slacking since I started school. ...and that was about 20 years ago.