Greece 2025: Day 3 – Halkidiki Blue Lagoon Cruise

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Obligatory selfie. This is where the bus dropped us off and we had to walk down a hill to the boat behind us.

Saturday’s adventure: a tall ship boat ride to beaches around the Halkidiki Peninsulas. The title of this tour was “Halkidiki Blue Lagoon Cruise On A Pirate Boat From Thessaloniki”.

When making the reservation, I chose a spot in Thessaloniki where a bus was supposed to pick us up. It was kind of a random street corner. When the bus pulled up (10 min late) the driver said it was the bus to the Blue Lagoon cruise but we weren’t on his list. The driver suggested “maybe” there is another bus? After some negotiating and a phone call to…someone? (all in Greek) we were allowed to board that bus.

I thought we were sailing out of the Port of Thessaloniki…so imagine our “concern” when we drove straight out of town, 90 minutes SOUTH! We were starting to wonder what was going to become of us…a nice young lady across the aisle on the bus (from Poland) showed us her confirmation for the same boat ride. She booked on “Get Your Guide“, we had booked on “Viator“. Her tour description mentioned a 2 hour bus ride each way…ours did not. (As of this writing 2 years later, the Viator ad still doesn’t mention the 2 hour bus ride). Don’t worry, I made that clear in the review. The drive was actually very pretty and it was nice to see the acres and acres of olive groves and vineyards.

We drove out to the town of Ormos Panagias and boarded our vessel. Good news, we were on the manifest, phew! We were all relieved we were in the right place, for sure! We spent the morning at the Blue Lagoon Beach on Diaporos Island, had a somewhat icky lunch, then spent the afternoon at Robinson Beach down at the southern end of the middle of the 3 peninsulas of Halkidiki.

Guests were allowed to jump off the boat and swim to shore at our stops. Dave and Tim did that at the first spot and I got a photo of them swimming towards shore. Tim spent ALL the time in the water (he’s always been my fishie fish son!)

The day was lovely with mostly mid and high clouds to keep from completely baking us. We ended up still having a fun day despite all the sketch travel and are thoroughly beat from being outside all day…

#europeanadventure #halkidiki #greece #athoscruises

The ship is called the “Menia Maria III”.
You have to look closely to see the route we took today. It’s a light olive color along the east coast of the westernmost peninsula.

Dave’s on the left, Tim’s on the right. They had to swim about 100′ to shore.

You can see Tim in the middle of the group of us in the water.
Cute crab. Tiny crab: about 2″ across.
We climbed up some rocks to get some nice views.

Getting my Little Mermaid on. I have an AI version of this photo where my hair looks less wet.

A weird lunch. Technically those are pork, beef, lamb “meatballs” but they look like…something else. I basically ate the vegetables and slice of bread.