CORFU, GREECE: A SUNNY DAY ON THE IONIAN SEA!

Wednesday, November 4, 2026
Day 30/50
Corfu, Greece
72F, sunny! 

Ionian Sea  as seen from Corfu

Sleepy, sunny Corfu awoke to greet us this morning.  We opted to visit Corfu on our own, as we were here previously in November 2022. At that time, we visited the mansion of the last king of Greece that is now a museum and a couple other sites.  I mentioned then that I wish we had more time in the Old Town—and today we did just that!  Princess provided a shuttle into the Old Town (15 euros/pp rt) but we learned that a city bus from the same stop was 4 euros/pp rt. You can do the math on that! 

Achilleion Palace/2022

Greek Pottery: 4th/3rd c. BCE/2022 visit

Dining Room/Palace: 2022 visit

Fortress

Fortress!

We really love strolling through the narrow streets and passageways of the villages of Europe—and we are always looking for a café for coffee and some local treat. 

 

Electrical work like this

is fascinating

Fresh vegetables

Street scene

The permanent population of Corfu is approximately 100,000 residents, making it the third most populous island in Greece.  Corfu, known in Greek as Kerkyra, is the 2^nd largest of the Ionian Islands, sitting at the northwestern edge of Greece at the mouth of the Adriatic Sea.   The capital city is Kerkyra, home to roughly a third of the island's permanent population.  The island spans an area of about 235 square miles with 135 miles of coastline.

The Palace of St. Michael and St. George

now the Museum of Asian Art

Detail

The Corfu Old Town is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site renowned for its Venetian fortresses, French arcades (Liston), and narrow cobblestone alleys shaped by Venetian, French, and British rule before joining Greece in 1864.  The economy is heavily driven by international tourism during the summer months, alongside local olive oil and wine production.

 

We   did our best to boost the economy!  One of our first stops was a shop we visited in 2022, and we recognized the same shopkeepers!  So many shops have creams and lotions and soaps made with pure olive oil, sweet treats with kumquats, baklava perfectly packaged, all kinds of olives also packaged well, and the usual kitchen towels, t-shirts, gold jewelry, and casual clothing made in Greece.  I do like to give a small gift to those who read the blog and we have stopped worrying about our luggage. We will purchase another bag and pay the price at American Airlines. We hope we can have our broken zippered Travel Pro luggage repaired so we are lugging them home, too.

 

Our first break was for coffee and a cinnamon sugar crepe, giving us more energy to keep going.  

Cinnamon and Sugar Crepe

It seems we are so hungry that we 

eat before remembering to take a photo!

Workshop: handcrafted 

olive wood

The craftsman himself

Granddaughter B2, in college, likes 

natural kitchen utensils

Later I discovered a shop that had sfogliatella and I am not going to pass that by. There were 3 different fillings to choose from: Biscoff, Lemon, and White Cream. I chose TWO white creams, TK chose Biscoff and Cream.  This is not exactly exciting news, but I will never pass up sfogliatella. If only Trader Joe’s still sold frozen sfogliatella—I must go to Europe to find them!  I promise this will be the last word on this favorite, even though we will be looking for it in Sicily.

It pays to look inside!

 

Sfogliatella on top, baklava on lower shelf

Closeup of sfogliatella

And we left the lovely Corfu--

Hotel Konstantinoupolis

est. 1862

It was a very pleasant day, and I think we are caught up on our rest. Our next stops are Kotor, Montenegro, and Split and Dubrovnik, Croatia. Four ports in a row with no 7:30 a.m. tours! We are on our own!

 

TK’s Takes: Only saw a couple cats, lots of dogs.  The Enchanted Princess is docked next to us and he can see our stateroom for our February 2027 cruise from our Island Princess stateroom. The weather was perfect today.   The clock turns back one hour tonight!

Where in the world are we?

You can see we are leaving

Athens, Turkey, Rhodes, Santorini,

Mykonos, and Crete behind...

 

THE WIND BLEW US TO CORFU!

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Port of Corfu, Greece/Ionian Sea

Aboard the Enchanted Princess

Room Aloha 212

Sunny, 68F (another gorgeous day)

 

TK took this photo from the ship-Port of Corfu

An island of sculptures, gardens, and olive trees.

One of Greece’s gems, Corfu is only two miles from Albania in the Ionian Sea. The seventh largest Greek island, it is about 40 miles long and 20 miles wide at its greatest width.  In Homer’s Odyssey, Corfu is where Ulysses is shipwrecked and meets Nausicaa, he was nude, and she gave him a blanket (as noted in famous paintings). I don’t know the rest of that story!

 

[Note: “In Homer's Odyssey, Nausicaa is a Phaeacian princess who discovers a shipwrecked Odysseus sleeping on a beach, rouses him and enables him to continue his voyage back to his home in Ithaca.” Thank goodness for Google]

 

Phoenicians, Roman, Venetians, the French (1797-1814), and the British all conquered this Greek island, but Britain “magnanimously” gave the island back to the Greeks in 1864.  

 

It was the Venetians who destroyed the Parthenon on the Greek mainland just after 1672, a temple that had existed for 4000 years. But the Venetians did prevent the Turks from invading the island and they planted thousands of olive trees in the rich soil.

 Prince Philip was born in Corfu and Gerald Durrell, a world-famous naturalist, was raised here.  Corfu was the summer home of Kaiser Wilhelm before he abdicated in 1918.

 Janie and TK, who were doing a visit on their own, arrived on the island, and headed straight to Corfu Town via a shuttle bus ($15/each covered both ways).  No more Ulysses and Nauticaa.

To our delight, many stores were open. We were warned that most shops would be closed because it was Sunday, but with over 3600 people and possibly the last cruise ship for the season, shopkeepers needed to be open.  I love walking around these Old World cities, the weathered sidewalks, signs of Venetian, Greek, and Roman architecture, shops, bakeries, cafes, and restaurants everywhere.  To make it seem like we were sightseeing as well as shopping I did take a few photos.

Plaza in Corfu Town

Same area

Pastry-but American style

I love shops on narrow streets

Janie before her bag weighed 30 pounds

Beautiful sidewalk

TK caught this little area

Scarves for sale

Churches all over

TK loves it when I zigzag all over with no purpose but to see what is around the next corner, one more shop! We did make lots of purchases to the tune of about 30 pounds worth of olive oil soaps, olives, and olive oil. I admit that I also love the Greek face creams and bought some of those too. And we still have 7 ports to go.  Oh dear.

Interesting buildings

Olives and soaps for sale

More shops

Janie shopping!

TK makes purchases too, like honey and sesame seed coated almonds and loukoumi [soft jellied, berry flavored candies]. He bought olives for himself. They are so nicely packaged, vacuum wrapped flat, with a 2025 expiration date.

TK likes to shop too.

A restaurant called Rex called out to us. The moussaka sort of looked good and the spanakopita-like dish had A LOT of spinach, so we opted to share a Greek salad, so very fresh—with very fresh feta cheese, tomatoes, capers, cucumbers, onions, and peppers, accompanied by fresh bread with olive oil. The olive oil was wonderful, and I am glad that I stocked up.  Just eating a salad gave us room to share a spectacular ice cream filled baklava. Oh wow. I never even imagined such a treat. The maître d’ told me that they make everything right there, including the baklava. Just WOW!  And I forgot to mention that we found sfogliatella at one of the bakeries-we did not pass that up either. Ann said we could have all the pastry we wanted.

TK at Rex

Greek salad on my plate, already tossed

Baklava and ice cream--what's not to love?!

Rex

Rex--TK is sitting far right

For those of you who read Greek!

We were not far from the port, but 2 miles from the ship, so after lunch and at least 30 pounds of bags—you think I’m kidding—we hopped on the shuttle back to the ship.

Back in the cabin

After a bit of respite, we went to dinner for caprese salad, English roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. The dessert was Viennese apple strudel, and we ate that too.  

TK at dinner--I love this shirt

Caprese salad--very good!

TK is resting--no takes and a few photos did not fly into my inbox yet...

By the way, this was an over 12,000 step day.

WINDY CORFU, GREECE GREETED US TODAY!

Corfu, Greece
Aboard Regal Princess
Stateroom C512
November 13, 2022
Cloudy, some rain, 68 F

For our visit of Corfu, we opted for a Princess guided bus tour. Good thing because there was a lot of sitting!  Plus, we could meet at 8:30 a.m.—that is like sleeping in (7 a.m. wakeup). 

Our tour guide was Constantine, and the bus driver was Dimitri.  We passed by yellow and beige apartment buildings with tiled roofs, plant filled balconies, clothes hanging to dry outside, typical of the Mediterranean, as we traveled outside the city. This island, about 229 square miles, is the 2^nd largest of the Ionian islands with about 120,000 population. Corfu’s population is about 45,000.

According to Constantine, Corfu is off Greece’s northwest coast in the Ionian Sea and is defined by rugged mountains. Greece can be seen across the water.  The medieval fortification was built by the Venetians who were ruling at that time and fending off the Ottoman Empire. They ruled for about 400 years until 1797. Corfu was incorporated into the Napoleonic Empire until 1807 when it became a British protectorate after the emperor’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Inhabitants did not like the British and in 1864 Corfu was ceded to Greece.  One can only imagine the influence of so many cultures, just like Dubrovnik and Kotor.

 

Constantine spoke of the Mediterranean weather, mild winters. This past summer the temperature was over 100F most of the time. December through February is the rainy season. Today was very windy with little sprinkles here and there. It was warmer on Corfu than on the ship!

Our first stop was at a higher elevation so we could get an overview of the island and small islands nearby.

 

View of the Ionian Sea from a hilltop on Corfu

You can see it is cloudy today

Then we stopped at a museum that was built during the time of the British, originally mansion previously owned by the last King of Greece, King Constantine II. The monarchy was ousted in 1973 and the “king” is very unpopular today (he is still living, sometimes in Hellenes, Greece and sometimes in London). The government owns all the king’s mansions today.

Paleopolis

Mansion of the last king of Greece, now a museum

Sign for the museum

Dining room

A room in the mansion

Greek lamps from 4th to the 3rd century BCE

Greek artifacts, 4th, 3rd c. BCE

A beautiful Greek artifact--4th-3rd c. BCE

More Greek artifacts

The trieme, a beautiful ship

Lots of hard work

The bottom row was described as tools for applying cosmetics.

Several early representations of the Greek goddess Artemis,

goddess of the hunt. She would roam the forests of Greece 

The goddess Diana is her Roman equivalent

Mostly depicted with a deer

6th century BCE

You can see three sizes of bronze shoes and sandals here--

hard to imagine wearing those!

This museum, sparsely furnished, houses several informative exhibits of Greek history. The grounds are beautifully kept. Apparently this mansion has been used for a setting for the PBS show, The Durrells of Corfu, a British comedy-drama television series loosely based on Gerald Durrell’s three autobiographical books about his family’s four years on Corfu (1935-1939).   I have not seen this show.

 

Ruins of a Roman Catholic basilica across road from the King's Mansion

The bus returned us to the Old City for time on our own. I could have used a lot more time here because the shops and goods were delightful—olive oils, spices, salts, soaps, candies, stylish clothing, jewelry, and more. Too soon we had to return to the bus for a ride back to the ship.

Street scene by the old city

City street

City street

Shops along the way

Poemgranates! They are in season here

Street sign

Delectable sweets!

Fortress--Medieval fortification built by the Venetians

We were not as fatigued today, but all we did was go to dinner. TK watched some of the Buffalo Bills football game. Our “Football Sunday” family is surely enjoying the day.  The Bills game came on at 8 p.m., to give you an idea of the time difference of seven hours.  We are both looking forward to a day of rest tomorrow!!

 

TK’s Takes: He liked shopping in Corfu--candy and olives!  So many cats! And they are all friendly. Dear granddaughter B2 would love all the cats we are seeing, calico, yellow, gray striped, black, white, and cream colored to name a few.

He also enjoyed the shopping—including olives packaged to take home and kumquat candy.

 

TK: about 9500 steps

Janie: 9850 steps