Day 15: Santorini -> Piraeus -> Athens

Thursday, September 27

We didn't want to leave Santorini, but had enough ferry issues that we wanted to make sure we made our flight Saturday morning.

We had breakfast at a place called Hook, which had the cheapest breakfast we'd had. I had my last European crepe with banana and Nutella. On the way back to the hotel, we picked up food for the journey--yogurt, cereal bars, and hard-boiled eggs.

We got the woman at the hotel to call a cab, but there weren't any. Eventually, she got her brother to drive us, although we didn't know at first that was who it was. He took us to this winery on the caldera that had a great view. We were a little nervous, though, because we thought our tickets had a sailing time rather than an arrival time. I think we wound up giving him 15 Euros, although he told us that since he wasn't a taxi he couldn't charge, but then said 15 Euros.

We waited for the boat to come in one undercover area, only to be herded later to another loading area. This ferry, the HighSpeed5, was larger and nicer than the other ferries we'd been on, and we even had assigned seats. We sat across from Texas cousins, chatted some, did crosswords, and grazed.

Once back in Piraeus, we found the subway and headed into Athens.

We'd not been able to get the same hotel we stayed at the first time. They said most hotels were going to be full, but we never found out why. We stayed at The Marble House in a room with a shared bathroom. It was close to the Acropolis and also had a stash of books available for trading.

Daniel selected two places from the guide that we could try for dinner. The first one seemed closed, so we wound up at the 24-hour restaurant and had our first meal fully indoors in a long time.

We walked up toward the Acropolis. There were all these book sellers along the lower path around it. Nothing really in English, though. We walked around some more before heading back to the hotel.