July 2, 2015

After a long 8 hour ferry ride from Athens, we made it to Santorini.  I have to say, I’m pretty much in love with Santorini!!!  The landscape is beautiful, the food is amazing and the beaches (although a little cold), are very nice.  We got here on Monday afternoon and got right on the shuttle from the port to our campsite.  The campsite was nice with plenty of room for tents and a view of the water.  We got set up in our “home” for the next few days and decided to go check out the town.

We stayed in the town of Thira (Fira) just outside of the city center.  It ended up being a perfect place to stay.  We were only a 5 minute walk from the center of town with tons of shops, restaurants, and a fabulous view!  We walked around town for the evening and stayed to watch the sunset.  We also stopped by a travel agency and signed up for a volcano tour for the next day.

After a good night’s sleep, we slept in a little (it was hard to sleep in since the sun was up and the tent doesn’t block much light!), then got up to get ready for our excursion.  We took a wooden boat out to an active volcano just across from the island of Santorini.  The volcano was really cool, we hiked to the top and saw both of the craters.  Hayden has been into volcanos for a while, so he really enjoyed getting to see it.  The volcano is active, so you could even see steam coming out of the crater (although it’s hard to see in the pictures).  We looked at some of the volcano monitoring equipment and hung out at the top for a while enjoying the view.

Once we finished at the volcano, we got back onto the ship and sailed across the volcano to where the water is heated by volcanic hot springs.  We swam here for a couple of minutes before taking off again.  From the hot springs, we came back around to the island of Santorini again to see the view from the water.  It’s even more beautiful than the pictures show!  The water is so blue…it’s like the color of sapphires…really pretty.

After a long day of hiking up volcanos and swimming in hot springs, Hayden and I were too pooped to climb all the way back up to the town, so we hitched a ride on a donkey!  lol  It was fun, but our donkey was very stubborn and didn’t want to be told where to go.  He kept running into other donkeys and stopping in the middle of the road, but it was fun.  🙂  We had super yummy Gyros for dinner with baked feta cheese and pitas…it was SO GOOD.  I am planning to try and make all of this food when we get back home, but I’m afraid I will never get it to taste as good as it does here.

Wednesday we didn’t really have any plans, so we walked down to the black sand beach to go swimming for a while.  Unfortunately, the water was freezing and there was a pretty strong undertow, so we spent most of the morning making sand castles and tanning.  Hayden and Adam were brave and got in the water, but I was a big weenie and stayed on land where it was nice and warm.  We finished off the day with another dinner of Gyros and ice cream (of course) for dessert.   I think that our favorite part of the island is that there is an ice cream shop every 10 feet…definitely our kind of place!

We are taking the ferry back to Athens this afternoon and camping out in the train station for the night so that we will be there for our train in the morning to Patras.  From Patras, we will catch another ferry over to Italy and be in Naples by the 4th of July!