We arrived from Hydra to the nearby island of Spetses undergoing an island wide electrical blackout, so we required careful guidance from the ship to a waiting van to take us to the Poseidonion Grand Hotel. It was so dimly lit it would not have been difficult to take a few misguided steps and end up bobbing in the Aegean.
Our van driver was Indian and well as the bellhop taking our luggage to the room. Filipinos in Samos and Indian in Spetses. How Greece has changed!
My goodness the “Grand Hotel” in the hotel’s name is no misstatement or exaggeration. The hotel was built by Sotorios Anargyros, descendant of the great 18th century Spetsiot family who had emigrated as a young man in 1868 to the United States becoming a wealthy tobacco tycoon who started on a mission to transform Spetses. The hotel was built by him in the style of the Carleton in Cannes and the Negresco in Nice. It rapidly became the favourite vacation spot for high society, royalty and rich Athenians who came to enjoy a small slice of the grand life.
One can’t see much of its exterior when arriving in pitch blackness. Hotel generators kept lights on the lobby and we were welcomed with a glass of prosecco on check in very Old-World way particularly in Portugal!
We joined T and I in the small dining area off the Library Room for a dinner of sea bass.
Our room may not be classic Old-World but allocated a humane amount of space in comparison to our Superior Room broom closet in Hydra it feels like a glorious football pitch! A rather colonial type room with broad planked wooden floors similar to the older homes I have been in Salem, Massachusetts where planks of two hundred years ago were much larger than today’s.
Next door on the balcony a group of American girls is shouting to their friends “back home in the States” about their minute-to-minute adventures in Greece accompanied by a howls and shrieks! Sounds like a neighbourhood raucous teen party! Love that sign in the bathroom saying “No paper and foreign objects” by the toilet. No flush! Stuff! Strange but not uncommon in Greece. Glorious sleep in a football sized (at least it felt so) ro
