We woke up at midnight on 22 April and realised that we missed dinner. We’d planned to have dinner and drinks at the top of our hotel while looking onto the Acropolis. It’s meant to be quite beautiful at night and for my birthday it seemed like quite a nice way to spend the night. Unfortunately, our jetlag and continuing sickness (a cold I’d caught from just after the wedding) made us sleep well into the night. I was a bit upset about this but I can’t really complain considering we’d had such a great day exploring Athens.
We spent the time planning our day (with a small moment of moping around due to the fact that we were still awake and missed dinner). This was going to be our last day in Athens and we would be taking the ferry that afternoon to Santorini.
After going back to sleep we woke up and followed our plan. At 7am we made our way to breakfast at the hotel. Chantal stayed with her previous meal plan of healthy foods and I proceeded to gorge myself on bacon, eggs, sausages, and anything else that would reduce my lifespan. I’m on holiday, can you blame me?
I’d forgotten to print the ferry reservation back at home but after talking to the awesome people at the hotel they let me know that they have a printer I could use. We packed our luggage, ready for the afternoon, got the reservations printed, and made our way around Athens again. We had hopes of shopping but didn’t have much luck buying anything. We weren’t in the mood to purchase anything and got over it pretty quickly. So very much like a normal weekend shopping.
We decided to have something to eat and had ran into an impressive patisserie with cakes, pies, and breads as far as the eye could see. We had a nice coffee and some foods which we couldn’t pronounce. Thankfully everyone is so helpful here and patient when we try to explain what we’re after.
We made our way back to the hotel, grabbed the luggage and checked out. Before doing so Chantal made contact with our hotel in Santorini and they confirmed they would be picking us up around 3am the next day to take us from the Santorini port to the hotel. And they were looking at getting us checked in to our room around that time as well (super impressed with them!). We grabbed a taxi to Piraeus, a more industrial area with the main port for boats and ferries coming in and out. It’s here that we’d be departing for Santorini at 6pm.
We made it to Piraeus, grabbed our tickets from the ferry ticket office, and wandered around looking for coffee and food. We started at a small café and made our way to a restaurant not too far away which also had free WiFi. We hopped onto the ferry around 4pm and checked out the cabin we booked. Cabins cost a fair bit extra than the standard ferry access but we were certain that we’d want a room to sleep in rather than roughing it out on a random patch of carpet. And sure enough we did see people setting up blankets on the floor or securing seats near powerpoints. Our cabin room was…well it was a room. We had a bunk bed (because we’re still children), a toilet and shower. It was enough for the approximately 9 hour ferry ride we’d be taking.
One of the scariest things (but scary in a ‘these trains are going to collide and I have to see every second of it’ way) was watching the trucks unload onto the ferry. I thought we were going to watch someone die as trucks, buses, cars, and people weaved in between each other to load onto the ferry. Thankfully no one was injured and no trucks collided. It was just another day for them.
We watched the ferry embark and made our way down to the bar where Chantal started to read her book and I started writing this blog entry.
Chris and Chantal 