An Abbreviated Hike - Sept. 12, 2010

Sunday September 12, 2010

Senne’s Summary: Today we thought about hiking to Oia (pronounced EE-AH) until we discovered it was 13 km one way. Instead we took an abbreviated but lovely hike.

This morning we took a little walk into town after breakfast to attempt to find the tourist office to see what we could do in Santorini. I was looking for a winery tour, but they don’t really seem to have any. Weird.

We walked around the town again and Steve and I thought we should look for the caldera path you can hike to Oia on. (Someone told us it was a lovely hike 😀). A nice person gave us directions how to find it, but warned us that it was about 13 km! Steve, me, Mom and Gary decided to start out and see what we saw along the way, but none of us committed to actually going the whole way. The view along the cliff is quite lovely and we saw a lot of buildings built in the traditional cave house style.

When we got to a road that looked like it probably led back down to our hotel Mom and Gary decided to go that way, while Steve and I carried on down the path.

There go Mom and Gary!

We walked as far as Imerovigli and then saw this landmass that you could walk out to that had no buildings on it. It looked interesting so we headed that way.

"Hey let's go out there! It won't be scary," he says...

Then we noticed THE CLOUD! It was a big dark rain cloud and you could see rain pouring down from it. As we said the words, "let’s turn around" it started to sprinkle. We hightailed it up the steps to the last café we saw. We made it just in time. It started pouring! (We were hoping mom and Gary had made it inside somewhere…and later found out that they also found a café to hide in).

Waiting out the rain!

Steve and I tried to order a Bailey’s MilkShake and a Chocolate Souffle (perfect hiking food), but the restaurant didn’t want us to order it because they had to go outside and downstairs in the rain to get the ice cream and food, so we settle for a couple of sodas while we watched the rain. 😀

The rain didn’t last too long—maybe 20 minutes. When the sun was shining again we headed back out on our hike. There were a lot of steps down and then what Europeans like to call “historical steps” up to a very scary path. (In case you don’t know, I’m scared of heights.) I held Steve’s hand (tightly at times…he calls it the death grip) and we skirted the path around the landmass to the other side.

The view of course was beautiful, and I managed to enjoy it despite my fear...

We hiked back to town and then back to our little hotel.

Oh I almost forgot to tell you about the lunch adventure. We tried to have lunch in town, but must have been in the “Cruise Ship Passenger Rip-Off Zone” because everywhere we found was EXPENSIVE! We headed as far away from the cliff as we could and found a little souvlaki place where lunch was 10 Euros for the both of us. Much better. While we were sitting there a lady came and sat by us who was talking to her stuffed dog. I wasn’t too worried until she started stabbing her fork into her plate as hard as she could. I took that as our signal that it was time to leave!

Luckily, we have a pool… so when we returned home, we went for a nice dip to cool off! Mom and Gary soon joined us. Well Gary took a dip and Mom watched from the edge. Mom doesn’t like to get wet... She never overheats anyway, she doesn’t need to get wet.

We decided to go eat dinner on the edge of the cliff in town tonight. As we arrived the sun was setting so we were able to get some pretty nice pictures.

Obligatory sunset in Santorini photo!

I chose an excellent restaurant. Really it was just lucky… there are so many to choose from. The view was incredible (overlooking the caldera) and we enjoyed our food immensely. I had pork tenderloin in some sort of cream sauce. It was one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten. I think I might need to go back and try it again. It was that good. That concluded our nice hiking day in Santorini!