Our third stop was by far my favorite. We went to the island of Santorini. It’s a group of islands that ring around a crater which all was the result of a volcanic eruption or, as we call it in the biz, a giant caldera. Think crater lake, only a lot bigger.
The cliffs were lined with hotels and Nina did an amazing job picking out our hotel, site unseen. The only downside was that our room was halfway down the cliffs and we had to take about 200 steps to get there. This, coupled with the facts that our room was near the outdoor dining area and faced the sunset, we weren’t exactly encouraged to leave, which wasn’t such a bad thing.
We did force ourselves to do a little exploring. We visited a little village called Oia. We made a short lived attempt at hiking. And we joined an American couple from Oregon for a few meals and shared stories of The Motherland. But all in all, our days consisted of eating, reading and basking in the sun. Pretty much perfect.
We did have a brief scare regarding some planned worker strikes that could have affected our ferry tickets which in turn would have affected our flight home. Things ended up working themselves out but Nina had gotten pretty worried over the possibility of missing our medical school graduation. I argued there were worse things in the world than being stranded on a greek archipelago.