This week we are going island hopping, so Monday morning we got George to drive us to Piraeus, the Athens port, and we caught the high-speed ferry to Santorini. This is the classic island that you see in all of the travel pictures, with white buildings clustered on a hillside and blue-d0med churches.The ferry ride was smooth and comfortable and much quicker than I expected. We arrived in the Santorini port and our hotel, the Keti, had a shuttle bus waiting to pick us up.Don selected the Keti Hotel because of the comments he read on TripAdvisor. His favorite quote is from the woman who wrote to say that she was so elated with the view from her room she couldn't stop giggling.
When the shuttle arrived in the town of Thira our hotelier was waiting to meet us. He took Don's heavy bag and lead us down some well-marked steps. Then we went down more steps, and more and more and more. We wound through the labyrinth of whitewashed walls, down, down, down, until finally we came to a gate with the name, Hotel Keti. Down several more flights of stairs and then we went into the office to register. Down two more flights of stairs, and we were shown our room--a very spacious room with queen bed, desk, mini-kitchen, and bathroom. The best part is the terrace, equipped with table and several chairs and a view that leaves you breathless.
After settling into our room we went out to explore. We hiked up and up and up the stairs to the main part of town. We checked out a few restaurants for dinner and found a little cafe full of giggling teenagers for a quick and inexpensive lunch. Then we set out to walk all along the rim path from one end of the village to the other. Don happily took photos of local scenes, whitewashed buildings, fabulous views and we searched, to no avail, for those quintessential blue-domed churches we see in the post cards.
Santorini Island is the site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history, which occurred some 3,600 years ago at the height of the Minoan civilization. The eruption left a large caldera surrounded by volcanic ash deposits hundreds of feet deep and may have led indirectly to the collapse of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, 110 km (68 mi) to the south, through the creation of a gigantic tsunami. Another popular theory holds that the Thera eruption is the source of the legend of Atlantis. This excerpt is from Wikipedia. The city of Fira, or Thera, where our hotel is located, is perched on the rim of this crater. 
After a 6 mile hike and dinner we hit the sack to rest up for the next day.
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