Advertisement
Published: January 14th 2010
Up and ready to go at 9am and the transfer driver was early which is kind of unusual for anyone in Greece ! Once again we are traveling on the Highspeed 5 fast boat ferry, but it is only a short 30-45 minute trip from Ios to Santorini. We arrived at Athinos (the new Fira port) port in Santorini around 11am. The port was crazy busy! We lost Alice in the pandemonium of disembarking the ferry. We found our driver and eventually met up with Alice . To leave the port you drive up an incredibly steep road with hairpin turns and tight switchbacks all the way to the top. The buses barely fit and some cars had to back down the road when they met a bus at a tight corner.
We got to our hotel, the Caldera’s Lilium Villa after about a 10 minute drive from the port. The hotel is absolutely gorgeous! Our room is enormous and consists of a living room with a dining area and kitchenette, a separate bedroom (Yay!) and a palatial bathroom with a Jacuzzi. Our suite is down 2 flights of stairs but so what! We have a private deck and the
Room View 2
View from our room's balcony at the Caldera's Lilium Villa Hotel Fira Santoriniview is fabulous. I can’t actually find enough superlatives to describe this hotel and our room!!
We made arrangements to get a rental car right away while we were checking in. We picked out a Citroen cabriolet. Within an hour they brought us a baby blue Citroen Pluriel which has a roof that has rigid pillars, but a soft sliding roof. The roof slides almost all the way down in the back, but unfortunately that completely blocks the rear window. The guy from the rental company showed how to operate the roof and warned us not to put the top the rest of the way down and stored in the boot area as he said it was difficult to put the roof back up. He also warned that we shouldn’t leave the top down at night due to the dampness. We didn’t believe him of course (about the difficulty) and put the roof all the way down as soon as he left and we had no idea why it would be so damp that we would need the roof up as we had left the top off the Jimmy all night on Ios with no problems.
We immediately
Steve on the cliff
Literally a 900 foot drop to the rocks and ocean below set off for the supermarket on the edge of Fira town to buy some food to cook in the room with a warning from the hotel desk that the most we should cook in the room is some pasta as one guest had caused a fire by frying something. This is the first real supermarket I’ve been into in Greece . Even though they are called supermarkets, they are tiny by American standards, but they do pack a lot of variety into the space. I’ve discovered that Greece has the best cherry juice and cherry flavored yogurt. I don’t know if it’s because cherries grow abundantly in Greece or if they just process stuff differently, but the cherry flavored foods and drinks are heavenly. We bought some fresh bread and pita at a bakery near the hotel on the way back. Oh, Diet Coke is called Coke Light in Greece , I think they should change the name in the U.S. to Coke Light, it makes more sense!
We unpacked, got settled in and Alice and I went to the hotel pool and Steve went to sleep. Alice and I came back to the room to nap after swimming
Sunset from our room
View of the sunset over the volcano from our balcony - amazing!!!! also. I got up around 7:30pm to make sure I wouldn’t miss the sunset. I showered and sat on our deck wearing one of the robes the hotel provided feeling all pampered and luxurious! I woke Steve up around 8:40pm to catch the end of the sunset, it was just beautiful. I think I took about 50 pictures trying to get just the right shot. Thank god for the delete button on the camera!
We headed up to the car (which was parked in the parking area in front of the hotel on the street) from the room and discovered exactly what the rental car guy had been talking about as far as dampness goes. We had left the roof down and the inside of the car was dripping wet, as a matter of fact it resembled a cave! Alice ran down to get a towel to mop up the car with, while Steve and I put the top up on the car. Okay here is where we found out just how difficult it is to put the top up on the silly car. We struggled with the stupid thing for about 20 minutes and were ready to just
Alice, Me & Steve
At the Koo Club in Fira Santorini give up and leave it open, when we tried one more time and it seemed to go together properly. Steve says I wasn’t operating the knob in the car properly, but I still think the pieces in the back weren’t lined up correctly the first 10 times we tried it. Anyway we just left the top up and just slid the soft top back (kind of like a soft sunroof panel) for the rest of our stay on Santorini!
We had asked at the hotel what the best clubs were and they told us the Koo Club, so that’s the first place we went. The club had a smallish inside area and a large outside area. We decided to sit outside even though it was a more than a bit damp and fog was literally streaming by us! The honeymoon couple we met on Ios walked in shortly after we got there and came over and sat with us for a while. It was kind of slow and boring at the Koo Club and it turns out we were there on a Latin music night, not our kind of music at all. There was also this really creepy dude
there that Steve nicknamed ‘the vulture’ as he kept silently circling his prey (um that would be any breathing female), but never spoke to anyone; just kept staring. After the honeymoon couple left, we went down the street to Murphy’s which was busy, but the bartender or DJ kept blasting this annoying air horn! After a while we couldn’t take it anymore and went for a walk to see what other clubs were around. We ended up back in the same area and went to the Box Club because they had drink specials. There was ‘trance boy’ dancing away all by himself on the dance floor at the Box Club. Eventually trance boy lured the hostess girls out on to the floor and was grinding them something fierce, which reminded us of the Dane Cook skit, which amused us immensely! It was almost completely dead in the club at this point, so we left. We stopped at the gyro place on the corner of the street, Steve and Alice got gyros and I got a tost, which is ham, cheese, bacon, eggs, tomatoes and spread on toast. Yum! We got back to the hotel around 2 or 3am.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.142s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 18; qc: 84; dbt: 0.0762s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
