Santorini

Santorini.  Paradise.  Beautiful.  Quintessential Greece (in my mind).  We'd heard great things and our expectations were wildly exceeded!  

Santorini is a gorgeous island that was formed by a volcano erupting so everything is set up very high on these steeps volcanic rock cliffs.  There is one main city, Fira, another tiny one called Imerovigli, and another one on the very edge of the island called Oia, rumored to have the best sunsets in the world.  We stayed in the tiny town of Imerovigli, and while there wasn't a ton going on except a few (amazing) restaurants, we're so glad we were there - we stayed in a cluster of white washed resorts/buildings and our owner/host was the cutest, most attentive Greek man you ever met.  We were a great distance from the action of Fira and the quaint sunset town of Oia, perfectly positioned in the middle.  

We rented a four-wheeler one day and it might have been our favorite day of the whole trip thus far.  We just zoomed all over the island and hit up some beaches and drove around the mountain roads and got to see everything.  And Drew didn't kill us, which was a huge bonus!  We also took a sailing trip around to the volcanic islands and hit up some more beaches, had a BBQ on the boat, and drank lots of Greek wine.  That was fun.  We truly loved this little island and highly recommend it.  Here are a bunch of pictures!

Sunset on the balcony our first night.

And I thought I'd do some blogging overlooking the blue water.  Why not.

View from our balcony looking down on Imerovigli.

Dinner on our first night at Estia!  This was my Mousaka....

...and Drew's Lamb/Pork/Beef Souvlaki.  SO GOOD.  We are going to try to figure out to make this when we get home and you're all invited.

See that tiny cluster of white houses on the very far left of the island?  That's Oia.  We hiked there, 2 hours, from our little town.  Sheesh!

But we did get some cool pics, like this beautiful church (behind me) overlooking Oia.  I love it.

After our hike, we went on the yacht tour of the island!  This is Drew jumping into the icy water.

Pulling into the Red Beach (named for obvious reasons) for a dip.

Sunset cruisin and boozin.  My hat flew off and a young weird newly married Indian couple nearby was too busy staring into each other's eyes to bother helping me and the hat fell into the water.  Lost forever.  I was livid.

The sunset off Oia's coast.

Deep thoughts.

Our last day we rented the four wheelers!  We were made Dumb and Dumber quotes/comments the whole day and generally just had a damn good time.

After our trip to the beach and snacks of beer and watermelon, we went back to Oia to wander around the town.  This is the view from the top of the city looking down.

And some more typical Greek scenes that I adore.

Oh, and one more stop by a gyro place in Fira that changed our lives.  

In terms of placing Santorini among the cities we did in Italy, we'd still say Positano and now Santorini were our favorites.  We love love loved it and enjoyed the 3 days we had there wandering around with no agenda and seeing the Greek sights.

Off to bed - I'll try to post about Mykonos tomorrow.  Night!