Day 10 - F U Santorini!!!!!!!!!!!!

the morning comes, and it is time to say goodbye for now to my beloved Crete.  It is the saddest day of the trip, not only the country, but all of the friends we have made through the years.  Crete is truely the place i want to spent my last days on earth.

Everyone was packed and ready to go when I came downstairs, so we loaded in the Prius and drove it down to the port where our boat was already been boarded.  We jumped inside and settled in for the first of 2 boat rides today.  First stop, the over-priced and over-rated island of Santorini.

We had been warned there was a problem with the road from the port up the hill to the top, but when we arrived, we realized, it was much worse than we expected.  There was a line of cars trying to get down from the top to pick up passangers, as well as drop them off, and it was a total madhouse.  We did run into a guy who promised us a shuttle to the top.  The problem was, we left in 4 hours, so time was of the essense.  It took a bit to drive up, but we finally made it and got dropped off at the bus stop.  The itenerary either said, take the bus to Akrotiri, or just hang out here in Fira, but first we had to the find the luggage place, which I had unfortunately not brought directions to.  we headed in the general direction, but alas, it was not to be found, so i asked someone and they sent us to a tourist shop nearby who agreed to watch our bags for a fee, and even take us back to the port.  the problem was, she said we had to leave in an hour.  basically enough time to eat lunch and head right back to port.  so we went to the first restaurant we found, and had a very expensive lunch, and went right back to the tourist office where it took us all of 20 minutes to get back to the port, because by now, all of the traffic had cleared out.  This meant we had 2 plus hours to sit around at the port and not get to see anything we wanted to.  this was my biggest failure of the trip and I apologized profusesly to C&H over and over and over.

finally our boat arrived behind a much bigger boat.  The boat had 3 stops, Ios, Milos and finally Sifnos.  We had finally arrived at phase two of the trip, SIFNOS!  We walked up the promenade to ur hotel, the Stavros.  We got our stuff up to our rooms and had a lovely dinner on the promenade.  We were then treated to our second amazing sunset of the trip.  Not bad.