What would a trip to Naxos be without a stroll around the Portara. This is a trademark of the island. Over to centuries the people have given it the name Portara - meaning huge door. It is a marble gateway into what was once a temple dedicated to Apollo. The temple was built in the 6th century B.C.


A walk through town in the evening. Even the Greek Orthodox priests need to line up to use the ATM.

Here is the Proof! Debbie does swim in the sea. We have moved from our "Greek beach" to the tourist beach. It is more sheltered, fine grain sand (no need for our little water shoes) and in the afternoon that is all one can do - put your hot body in the water.

We had an incident at our new beach the other day. A German fellow was staring intently into the water when his girlfriend entered the water. He told her to get something from shore which turned out to be a camera and together they got close to the surface of the water and started taking photos. Nosey me swam up to them and asked what they were looking at - it was a JELLY FISH which swam into the shallow water. Ìsn`t it beautiful` he said and he started to pet it...(a bit weird if you ask me but ...). As the day went on more and more people started to take photos of the jelly fish (so I always knew where it was when I was swimming). Then some children were looking at it by the shore. A large Greek man entered the water to see what everyone was looking at, saw it was a jelly fish, went to shore, picked up a child`s plastic pail, re-entered the water, picked up the jelly fish in the pail and deposited it on the sand on shore (I was hoping that young German man didn`t see this!) And so, the jelly fish was drying out in the searing afternoon sun. When I finished swimming and was entering the shore, I thought I`d look at this sea creature to see if it was yet dead. A young child (a regular Greek swimmer) took a paddle from a paddle ball game that everyone plays on the beach and was rolling this poor jelly fish back into the water. He did wait until the big fat Greek man was out of site before he did this. He kept flipping it and flipping it and flipping it until finally it flipped into the sea. It looked like it was regaining conscienceness by the I wandered away. We swam in the same bay this afternoon and there was NO jelly fish, so it must have swam back to it`s family in the deep sea.