Back Again…

Zara dress (similar)
Birkenstock sandals
Ellen James handbag
Celine sunglasses
Vintage necklace (similar)
Aurate NY bracelet (c/o)
Mejuri earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Hydra Old Town – Hydra, Greece

They say you can never go home again… and they mean that you can’t go back to places after time has passed, expecting them and how you experience them to be the same when you’ve changed. Mostly, in my experience, this is true. Often painfully so. Particularly when it comes to travel. The most memorable trips are the ones you can never truly recreate – with a few notable exceptions. There are two places in the world where I can always go back again: Paris, and now, Hydra.

We visited Hydra for the first time in 2019. It was just a day-trip. We caught the ferry – or, to be more accurate, a very high-speed boat – over from the mainland. The trip took little more than an hour, and we spent the day exploring. Eight hours was enough time to fall in love with the place. If I’m honest, we’d fallen in love within the first hour. But we didn’t necessarily plan to rush back again. (If we had, the pandemic would have upended that plan, anyway.) We didn’t even really plan to go back again on our trip to Athens this year. But when it came to booking out tickets back to Athens from Spetses, I thought, I bet we’ll be required to stop at Hydra, anyway. We could, in theory, get off the boat for the afternoon…

I was right. Most boats travelling through the Saronic Islands make a stop on Hydra. So we did, too. And as decisions go, it was a masterstroke, even though it meant hauling our little suitcases over cobblestones and up hills all day in the summer heat. It was absolutely worth it to be back again. The island is small enough that we had time to visit all our favourite places, enjoy a leisurely lunch at Techne, meet half a dozen friendly local cats and still stop for ice cream before getting back on the boat in the late afternoon.

Hydra was just as charming as we remembered, but there are some things to know about visiting that we only learned  this time around. Firstly, the timing of you visit makes a world of difference. We arrived two weeks earlier this year than in 2019, which was the difference between arriving in high season or low season. In high season, boats drop tourists off almost every hour throughout the day. The port is thronged with people, especially right after a ferry arrives, and it will be impossible to walk through it at any pace other than the one set by the first person off the boat. If you don’t like crowds, make sure you visit in low season – the weather will still be beautiful, most restaurants will still be open and, by comparison, you’ll feel like you have the island to yourself.

Secondly, while stopping off on the island while in transit from another one is easily doable, it’s not always super practical. There are no luggage storage facilities on Hydra, and no hotels that I could find willing to temporarily store luggage for a fee. That means that if you have bags with you, you’ll be carrying them for the day. We were willing to do it because we love Hydra, but it wouldn’t be for everyone.

So you can go back again, at least to some places, and love them as much as when you discovered them for the first time. Hydra is one of them, for me. But no two visits will ever be exactly the same. It’s important to keep that in mind, no matter how much you love a place. It will save you a lot of unnecessary disappointment, in the end.

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