Day 97

1:7
Santorini:Greece

Title: Waiting


I hate to gripe when I should be ecstatic to be in such an awesome place, but there's no denying how terrible this day started off.

We had to leave our hotel at 2:45 am to catch the bus to the airport. We didn't have an alarm clock in our room (we didn't know what time it was at any point during our trip. We almost missed the rooftop movie I talked about on Day 95 because of that), so we bought one at a local department store. Little did we know we were buying the loudest, most unforgiving alarm I've ever heard in my life. I thought a fire alarm was going off while the world was simultaneously being blown up. Not a pleasant sound to wake up to.

The flight to Santorini was short and pretty. The airport is litterally comprised of two rooms: arrivals and departures. As was the theme throughout the trip, Ally and I got our bags last of anyone on the plane, and were the last and only people left at baggage claim, or in the whole arrivals room. Then the ktels. Oh the ktels. Like I said before, they've got the worst organization when it comes to transportation. I'm not even going to go through what happened, but it took us two buses and something like 2 hours to get to Perissa, the small beachy town we stayed in.

Oh, and the directions all of our hotels gave us were similarly terrible. It told us that it was on Perissa Main Road. Okay, the bus dropped us off on a main-looking road. We walked down it with our bags in tow. It was only about 7:30 or 8AM at this point, but it was already soooo hot out, so the half mile long walked down the road was a little much. Nobody in any of the few restaurants that had already opened recognized the name of our hotel, so we had no option but to just keep walking.

We started to lose hope once we reached the end of the road. We took a side street that took us to another main-looking road, and walked down the half-mile of that. Oh, and they don't have sidewalks, so we were walking in the street, bags sticking out in traffic, and Greeks are terrible, mean, unforgiving drivers. We finally stopped in a travel agency that was nice enough to call the hotel and get directions for us. After another 15 minutes of walking, we were there!

It took us an hour of walking in circles in a tiny town to find our hotel.

And it wasn't even on Perissa Main Road. The street it was on wasn't even named. The hotel was the only thing on the 500m long road besides dead tomato plants and a broken down old restaurant with clotheslines running through it. Oh, and donkeys and horses. Can't forget the beasts of burden.

We then went to get food, and when we went to pay, Ally realized that we didn't have enough cash and they didn't accept cards. She had to take another half hour walk to find an ATM. Poor her. I really should have offered to go...