In about 12 hours I will be heading back to the airport again. I will be heading back to the US to get my daughter settled in her new city. It should be a whirlwind for a couple of weeks.
santorini
I am going to write about all the great sites on Santorini. Unfortunately, it will be a very short paragraph.
We got to our hotel. We saw how wonderful the hotel is, and then we saw how relaxing the beach was. At that moment we kind of realized that for the next few days we were not going anywhere. I am not kidding when I say the ONLY time we left the beach or the hotel was to walk to dinner. The best part, was the restaurants were all fantastic, and they were only a 10 minute walk at the farthest!
In one way we do not feel guilty for not exploring more. We took Aegean airlines from Athens to Santorini. I got an email about bidding for a business class upgrade. On many of the smaller planes it really does not make that much of a difference, but here we got free check in luggage; so I bid what the cost would be for the luggage, and the bid was accepted. As we were getting ready to land we were given two vouchers for a free flight. Apparently, the curtain could not be closed between the front of the plane and the back. That was such an affront to good order and discipline that Aegean felt the need to make it up to us. I am not complaining. My guess is when we go to book the next flight, there will be some kind of limitations, but if we are able to get one way paid for that still saves a lot of money! Even better we looked it up, and Aegean does fly out of Zürich. So we are already thinking about going back and this time we will actually see what else is on the island.
The one thing I did not do, that I am regretting a little was taking a hike up the mountain to this little church. Seen in the picture below.
It would have been about a two hour hike from our hotel and as you can see from the picture it is a pretty steep mountain. Oh well, that gives me something to do the next time!
I am still having a hard time figuring out how the hotel makes it financially. There are only 7 rooms in the place. Each room has it’s own small swimming pool. There is also a large pool closer to the beach, and a large outside bar. The bar is free for hotel guests, but it is only open from noon to five. They were kind of surprised at the amount of alcohol that two people can drink in five hours! I guess they had never had guests from Wisconsin before. Every other place near the beach has set up lounge chairs and umbrellas for people to use some you have to rent, but others are free as long as you spend so much money on drinks and food. Our hotel kept the beach front solely for the hotel guests. There was one umbrella for each room, and that was it.
As you can tell from the picture above, the sand is very dark almost black. The consistency of the sand is unlike any other beach I have seen. Sand is all just extremely small crushed rock and shells. This sand does not bind like the sands I have seen in on the East and West Coasts of the US. It would be impossible to build a sand castle and even at the area where the waves break on the shore you actually sink into the sand. It does not get that concrete like texture that I have seen in the US. The one big downfall is that the sand gets even hotter! We learned very quickly that you have to wear some kind of water shoe or sandal unless you have really hard feet. It was like walking on blacktop.
make up from Athens
A final couple of thoughts about Athens. It was a fantastic city. I was shocked to learn that close to 40% of the total Greek population lives in the Athens area. It is a much bigger city than I thought it was.
Did you know that naming rights existed even 500 years before Christ?
The picture above is from the large outdoor theater near the Acropolis. If you paid enough money you got a seat in the front row, and your name was carved in the seat. I do not know why, but that struck me as funny.
I do have some videos to share: One is of the changing of the guard in Athens. Another is also from Athens it is a walk around at the best preserved ancient temple in Athens. (This video kind of shows you what the Parthenon would look like today, if it had not been destroyed.) The third video is from swimming in the sea with my GoPro.
I probably will not have anything to write about the next few weeks; so enjoy your time off! Unless something really exciting happens while I am back in the US there will be about a three week break from posting!
The pictures below are left over from Athens, and the few pictures we took from the island.
