Greece Trip (Day 5) - Oia

The next day we woke up in Crete and got on a catamaran to go to Santorini. I won't say much about that trip. It was really really windy on the ocean and the boat rocked so so much. A lot of people got sick and we were very close. We met a couple who were also traveling to the town of Oia (pronounced EE-ah) so we asked to split a cab with them. Which was a very good thing because the port was crazy and we would have been there for a long time trying to figure out a ride.

We drove from the port, through the town of Fira and then on to Oia. Took about 30 min max. It was very cliffy, and mostly rock with a few feilds down below. We drove into Oia on the back side (since there is only one or two roads for cars) I was honestly getting a little nervous because we couldn't really see any of the white houses that you see on post cards or the volcano caldera. I was begining to think I'd made a big mistake.

Then we got to our hotel, tramped up the stairs and were led to the most beautiful view I could have asked for. This was our room right under the windmill at Golden Sunset Hotels. The sunests were so amazing. The bright yellows fading into pinks and ending in bright purples. We didn't even think about getting a different seat with the surrounding crowd that comes in to see the sunsets.

Everynight we went and bought a bottle of wine (Nico was our fav) and watched the sun go down from our hotel balcony. Then we'd get dressed go out to dinner and finish up at the bar down the street with Yani our bartender. He had some great stories and gave us tons of lemon juice marinaded carrot slices with our ouzo and Alfa beer.

The only down side to taking the ferry was that it was so windy that the waves washed up on our boat and soaked our suitcases. Mike's got the worst of it. He barely had anything dry for that first day. We laid everything out in our cavernous room and crossed our fingers that it would dry.

We had some decent meals and some really good dishes in Oia. This is a very big tourist destination so a lot of things were over priced, but we found some nice non-sunset view places later on that were pretty darn delicious.

Stuffed tomatoes
Mousaka, amazingly light and fluffy! We went back here on our last day and both ordered it as our meal because it was so good!

Yellow Fava bean spread

One thing I've been forgetting to mention about Greece is that there are dogs and cats every where! Not stray, but with collars and very friendly. The funniest part is that the owners just let them run around, so there is constently a poochie snoozing on a shops doorstep or flat out dead asleep in the middle of the pedestrian street. They must be so used to people because not much would wake them up. The only time I saw a dog wake up was when a scooter would shoot by or this one time that a guy actually tripped over a dog that was in the middle of the street sleeping.