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Excerpt from Cruises of the Athena: In Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean, 1911 Greece presents to the ordinary traveler obstacles sufficient to deter all but the most courageous - poor roads, inadequate railway service, primitive conveyances, and unspeakable sleeping accommodations in hotels and local steamers. On the other hand, it offers facilities to be found nowhere else in the world for cruising with moderate-sized steamers. The entire Ægean is surrounded with promontories and dotted with islands offering convenient shelter, while it reaches out its long tentacle-like inlets or fjords deep into the heart of the land, touching almost every point of interest. Here the small steamer - not the ocean liner whose size bars it from all but the widest open doors - bears a charmed life, affording transportation and accommodation alike where both are otherwise denied. The Athena is but the culmination of a long evolution. A series of chartered steamers, all of them compromises between local conditions and our own ideals, have led the way to our present more serious undertaking. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.