Santorini - Lazy Day! - Day 12

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I woke up around 10am because Steve got up to get some Dupon (pain reliever) for his crashing hangover headache. We all went up and had breakfast together. We had planned to have a quiet day, mostly hanging around the hotel. Steve went back to bed immediately after breakfast and Alice and I went to the pool. We stayed at the pool until about 1pm, when it dawned on me that we had to pick up the laundry in Fira before they closed at 2pm and the rental car had to be returned by 4pm! By this time Steve thought he was probably going to live through his hangover and got up to go with me. The laundry cost 45 Euros for 5 loads, but it was worth it to get it back all clean and folded. We walked across the street to Mythos for some chicken gyros and village salad to take back to the hotel for lunch.

During lunch we all decided that we should go somewhere in the car before we had to return it since we had paid a small fortune to rent it. Maria at the reception desk suggested either Monolithos beach or Firostefani. We decided to drive to Firostefani so I could try to get some photos of the famous blue domed churches.

Found a parking area in Firostefani and then walked about a kilometer along the caldera and I have to say that Firostefani is not as nice as Fira. But we did get some nice photos of Imerovigli from some point of land we ended up on near the Agios Nikolas Monastery with a sheer drop off to the Aegean and no fences or anything!! Filled the car with gas on the way back to the hotel and dropped the keys off at the reception desk at 4pm on the dot.

We all hung out at the pool, playing Frisbee in the pool and flinging it out onto the deck and almost hitting people. Kind of surprised we didn’t get kicked out of the pool area! We stayed there until about 7:30pm as it was still sunny and warm then. Steve cooked the rest of the ziti and we tried to finish up as much of the remaining food as possible.

We took the hotel shuttle into Fira to shop for souvenirs. We wandered around and bought stuff in a bunch of small shops and finally found a book store and bought a bunch of postcards, some paper and a whole bunch of random small gifts. Ironically one of the women working there also worked at our hotel at the reception desk. We hadn’t used the internet since we got to Santorini as our hotel didn’t have internet and although the Volcano View Villas next door did, they were always in use, so we really wanted to check e-mails and such. We went up a really narrow flight of stairs to the internet café, which was right next to the paper store. The guy working there said they were closing in 10 minutes, but said he would stay open so we could get 30 minutes of internet use. The guy working at the internet café brought us some homemade wine! He said he was a actually a restaurateur and was just minding the internet café for a friend. Very nice guy, but the wine was really strong!

Decided we wanted pizza for dinner at about 10:30pm and stopped at a little restaurant near the parking area across the street from Mythos that had brick oven pizza called El Grecos. We sat upstairs near the balcony overlooking the street. Nice place and the wait staff were prompt and attentive. We got village salad, tzatziki, pan fried potatoes (which were fabulous!) and El Greco pizza, yum!! We headed back out for a few more souvenirs. We walked by Murphy’s and Enigma and right across the street from them we noticed a pastry shop. They had cheesecakes, Greek donuts, pastries, crepes and ice cream. I got cherry frozen yogurt, Steve got caramel walnut ice cream on a cinnamon sugar crepe and Alice got strawberry ice cream. The cherry frozen yogurt was awesome! We then headed back to the hotel to finish packing and got to bed around 2 or 2:30am and set the alarm for 9:45am

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