Today is the second time that we’ve all visited Mykonos.  The first time, we really didn’t like it at all.  We had tried to just get a taxi to visit a beach, and we waited nearly an hour and were still unsuccessful.  That time, we ended up taking the public bus, which was a terrible experience and tourists from all over the world practically trampled one another to take the bus.  It was disappointing.

This time, we decided to simply get off the ship and walk around.  We chose to skip the beach today and just see the town and have some lunch instead.  Since we were last here, they’ve built a new dock, and we were lucky enough to be the ship that got to use it…the other two ships in town today had to tender.  After a short shuttle ride to the town, we started walking around.

Mykonos is a beautiful island.  All of the white houses contrasting with the bright pink bougainvillea and the blue roofs, doors, or staircase railings.  The streets are completely narrow…we actually watched a small truck nearly take his mirror off on the side of a building just trying to get down the street (we tucked into a doorway to avoid being smashed by the car!).

It was super windy here all day today…we all looked like crazy people because of what the wind did to our hair!  After a bit of shopping (Belinda has now bought clothes in every country we’ve visited), we ate lunch around the waterfront and ordered some traditional Greek food…and even a Greek white wine (which was pretty good).

Unfortunately, Mykonos will not go down as anyone’s favorite port of call.  While it is beautiful, there were 3 large ships visiting here today, so the streets were so crowded you could barely walk through them.  I think that the island isn’t ready for that great an influx of tourists — the actual population of the island is less than the number of people dropped off by the cruise ships — thus, the infrastructure isn’t really there to support that number of people trying to get around the island.  We can appreciate the beauty of Mykonos, but the two visits we’ve had there make us feel like the island has lost a lot of its Greek charm.

Since today was the 4th of July, the ship had a celebration ready for the Americans on board.  They had hundreds of cupcakes that they laid out in the shape of a giant American flag, and to kick off the celebration, they had one of the singers lead the crowd in the Star Spangled Banner.  It really was quite impressive to see probably 1000 people singing our national anthem over the three levels of the atrium.  No fireworks for us this year, but we enjoyed celebrating Independence Day in such a beautiful setting.