Santorini

Hey everyone! This morning we woke up early and caught a ferry to one of the Greek Islands known as Santorini. The ferry was really nice and actually pretty cool. It was much larger than most of us expected and it seemed to be moving pretty nicely. Even still, it took us 5 hours to reach the island. We got to the island port and saw very large cliffs all around us. Santorini is shaped like a giant crescent with beautiful cliffs all around. We had called the hostel ahead of time and so they picked us up when we arrived at port. To get to the main part of the city, we had to weave our way up these very steep cliffs which gave us quite a view. We checked into our hostel, which is really nice. We were split up into a two and a three, Sam and I in the two, and the other guys in the three.

Once we put our stuff away, we headed to rent ATV’s to explore the island with. It seems like the thing to do on the island and a lot of tourists either rent 4x4’s or Moped Scooters which you find everywhere in Europe. The locals suggested we take the 4x4’s though because they were safer and tourists have been hurt taking the sharp curves near the cliffs to fast and dying; so we avoided the Mopeds to say the least. We ended up paying 25 Euro for a two day rental which I didn’t think was bad at all. I really enjoyed riding them around the island; I had never ridden one before. They weren’t hard at all to pick up and pretty soon we were cruising all over the island. We ended up taking them to several different beaches and really across the entire island. We had lunch at the “Black beach” and then laid out in the sun getting our tan on (or burn) for about an hour. We then headed over the middle of the island and took a few pictures off the side of one of the cliffs and took some pictures of the “Red beach”. These beaches aren’t as nice as I would say Florida, Cancun, Hawaii, or other places in the Caribbean, but they definitely don’t have the picturesque cliff views that the Greek Islands have. After checking out a third beach, we came back to the hostel for a few minutes and headed off to another part of the island to watch the sunset. This area was beautiful and is pretty popular to watch the sunset. Most of the tourists on the island seemed to be in this area and we got a pretty good view by jumping on one of the rooftops.

Tomorrow is our last day of free travel before we head to Strasbourg. We have a 2am ferry that will take us back to Athens and then we fly from Athens to Frankfurt at 10:30.

Jonathan