Ahh. Greece, our unicorn. We've been trying to visit you for 3 years. We meet at last...

(Attempt 1 was our original honeymoon plans - get married in Athens (Georgia), honeymoon in Athens (Greece). However, the events and aftermath of Sept. 11 made us reconsider and choose a safer, domestic honeymoon, which was awesome!
Attempt 2 was last summer when we planned on going on a Greek cruise. However, a holding company for the Greek national cruiseline we'd booked went bankrupt.)

Our first view of the walled city of Rhodes.

The peninsula to where the new downtown has spread.

Looking back at the Costa Magica from across the port.

90° turn to the left.

after another 90° turn.

We wander through the walled city, just looking for an adorable picture spot. Did we find it?

On the other side of the same open area pictured above, Carey poses against a wall. See how it is recessed? There is something IN that wall...

Yup, nasty, scruffy kittens, clawing for their nine-lives onto the limestone walls.

Cool interior gate.

Of course it was group-picture time. You had to see that coming!
(We'd lost Bill and Carey by now...)

Many of the sidewalks are made of decoratively-laid stones.

Jill in front of the ruined Temple of Aphrodite.

The rest are simply non-decoratively laid stones. (There was no pavement inside the walled city, a trend soon noticed in many other places we visited.)

Random garden. Rhodes is filled with little surprises like this!

...and like the entrance to the market district between present-day downtown and the walled city.

Another decorative sidewalk.

Back near the castle walls, this is the floor of the moat.

Random alley inside the walled city.

Bill and Carey found the interior of the castle.

No idea where they found this. I'm telling you - surprises everywhere!

Not sure where they got this picture, either, but it was taken by Carey right after the last one.

Bill waves from the middle of a old-town square.

Then Jill and I split from mom and the Ayers. This is the far end of the walled town.

Mom and the Ayers explore the old windmills, which are now sans fans.

From the windmills, this is the view of the marketplace gate across the bay.

See the antelope on the pedestal? That is half of it...

The close antelope is the one from the other picture. This looks back towards where Aunt Caroline took that last picture. (Neither of us went where the other took their shot. Kinda cool...)
Ever heard of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world? Well, lore has it that his feet were where the antelope (one male, one female) are now. He guarded the entrance to the port of Rhodes.

Jill and I walk back to the old town to get something to eat (and drink).
Jill poses by a dumpy palm, for the likes of which she developed an affection.

I pose on some cannonballs. Oddly, this just makes me think of what I wanted to do by this point. So much cheese has had the opposite effect on my digestive system. The cheese had gathered in groups and determined that they did not want to go gentle into that good night...

Moving on to those who do NOT have that problem. These are the warmest clydesdales of all time. Having them on a subtropical island seems a little cruel, but they look gorgeous.
(OK, maybe they're not clydesdales, but they looked much larger in person.)

Walking back through the Knight's Road and the marketplace to find some lunch.

We found it! Actually, we found Carey and Bill just up the hill from this place - the one with the cheapest wine and one of the few restaurants that served kefalagraviera cheese.
This is during wine carafe #1.

After carafe #3, which the restaurant gave us to attract more business. (We would have gladly paid the equivalent of $5 for 1L of great red wine...)
We also had saganaki (fried cheeeeeeeeeese!), grilled hallumi (yes, grilled), and feta wrapped in aluminum foil (with garlic, olive oil, and peppers) and grilled.

Headed back to do some shopping. We'd found some pillow cases we wanted for the sunroom. After 3L of wine split 4 ways is the best time to shop.

Lost of shopping, back to the boat to drop some things off, then back out to wander around. This is a local restaurant in the walled town, quite similar to the next place Jill and I stopped for the afternoon serving of fried cheese.
This was the best food we'd had, so we got some more. Little did we know that this was the best food of the trip. Glad we went to another restaurant for more cheese and wine.

The aforementioned afternoon cheese-stop.

We found Bill wandering around Rhodes. We walked back to the ship together - and on the way back, we thought he had to pose by one of the first "Smart Cars" we saw. (We ended up seeing thousands more in the cities of Italy.)

After the best day on the cruise (mainly because it involved the most relaxation and local lifestyle), we depart.
That night, they had the midnight buffet INSIDE the kitchen as part of a behind-the-scenes tour.


That's it for Rhodes. It was one of the harder-to-get places (Cyprus probably being the only harder one), but one of the ones we'd most like to revisit. We really want to check out more Greek islands now. Sure, Athens was very impressive in many ways, but the island speed was much more enjoyable.

Next - Athens, Greece