Athens and a little Santorini

Well we got the boot from the ship today.  Heidi and Diane were first off the ship at 7:10 AM, their primary job was to do a wake up knock and make sure the rest of the stragglers leaving the ship at 7:55 AM were up and moving.  We were to meet our Athens tour guide, Kristina at 8:00 AM, so the fact the Heidi and Diane were off the ship earlier worked out perfectly.   The rest of the broads disembarked, quickly gathered out luggage and found our remaining broads and Kristina.  She suggested that we immediately go to the Acropolis as it would become very busy once all of the cruise ship people disembarked so we loaded ourselves onto the bus and off went to the Acropolis while Kristina provided us nonstop commentary on different areas of Athens.

Once we arrived, we were met with two old friends, the stairs and the heat.  We began the climb up to the Acropolis and I’ll be honest the history around it, the Parthenon, and all the other sites is really interesting.  However, if you want to know more, google it people, google it. 

We headed back down and found a cute cafe where we enjoyed a breakfast mainly of yogurt, honey, fruit, juice, coffee, and water.

After breakfast we headed over to the Acropolis museum.  This is were all the actual artifacts are being kept, well except for all of those being housed in London.  Because, according to the Brits, Greece didn’t have an acceptable museum to display them, which may have been true, but they do now.  I’ll admit, I don’t generally like going to museums because most of them I have gone to stink, as in actually smell.  This one is stunning and actually has transparent floors so that you can see the continued excavation of the old city ruins that are buried below.  I sometimes struggle to wrap my mind around how much history is in this part of the world as opposed  to the states.  I would insert pictures here of the museum, but they tend to frown on you taking pictures.

We left the museum, did a quick city tour and were then dropped off at the airport to catch our flight to Santorini.  We managed to get our bags checked and through security safely.  Unfortunately some of the contents of our carry on bags did not make it through security, but we soldiered on and went down to our gate and waited patiently to board the plane.  There is no rhyme or reason to boarding the planes here, basically you see the crew getting ready at the gate and everyone forms a line and chaos ensues.  Okay, it wasn’t really that bad, it was just different.

We landed safely, found our driver and were off to the town of Oia to our villa.  We were met by the villa caretaker, Raymont.  You aren’t able to drive through the town, so he told us to leave our bags, he grabbed two of them and off we went on our short hike to the villa.  Raymont was a trooper as there were numerous steps involved.  He let us into the villa and then made 3 more trips to grab the rest of our bags.  We figured out who was going to sleep where in the villa, had a brief rundown on the workings and then Raymont left for the evening.  We headed out to find some dinner and then came back and all crashed early as it was a long day.

Here are a few quick shots from the veranda of the villa this evening.

 

Who knows what tomorrow will bring.  Yes, we definitely still like each other.

Ta La’me