It was time to say good bye to our beautiful cave home and head for athens. We spent a good hour playing tetris to fit all our newly aquired wine collection, the estimation is that our main bag now weighed close to 90 pounds. So we started the accent of the 42 stairs, one stair at a time. It didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time when buying the wine however it quickly became apparently that the bag was bloody heavy.

I had considered at this point trying to round up a dozen or so of the stray dogs to form a egyptian like pyramid contruction team to carry the bag up the stairs however I figured that I would just soldier on. I made it up about 30ish stairs before one of the cleaning staff scampered up the side of the cliff (literially scampering in some parts) and made the universal symbol for “Ill take that” which if you look at it from the wrong direction looks like the same motion as “Butter”.

I gladly let him take the suitcase for the rest of the way (SC: 882).

We went and had a chat with Rose who then informed us that we could make use of the cliff home until we had to depart (another hour and a half) so we quickly had a bite to eat at the blue roof resturant and descended again (SC: 924). At this point we surprised the cleaning staff and they fled from cleaning the cave only appearing around the corner every 30 minutes or so while we enjoyed the air conditioning as the day was stinking hot already.

It was time to leave so we climbed the stairs again (SC: 966) and made our way one last time to the best bakery in all of Greece (that we have been to) and purchased two pastries for the road, we ended up getting another gallipigusi (original spelling left for entertainment value, correction by Jill: Galactobourikos) and Apples with cream.

We then took the ride down the hill to the port again with a new driver and sat waiting for our ship to come in. The ferry was late and we joined the press of people trying to board.

There are many things that I could say but I will leave it at, people boarding a ferry seem to lose all of their wits and become stupid. We are likely 1.5 hours behind schedule.

Our ship cabin’s toilet doesn’t work, I found this out after the fact. I went and complained and they said that they would have someone up to fix it. This also didn’t happen so I went down and complained about complaining and a dude came up with me. He didn’t speak very good english and kept telling me that I needed to be intense when I used the bathroom, I was not too sure what he ment by that. He arrived and showed me exactly what needed to be done.

You don’t press the button, you don’t push the button hard, you lift one foot off the ground, curl your right hand in a snake like gesture then redistribute your weight from one foot to the other and make like you’re snapping the wings off a dragonfly snap out at the button and retract back so fast that it appears like you have not moved at all. This is what you need to do to make the toilet flush.

10 points to the blue star ferries for that idea.

Jill now informs me that museam has a u, then after I corrected it she THEN informs me that Museum has two U’S!!!!!!

Over all the estimated wine consumption between Jill and I for the duration of Santorini is somewhere in the range of 11 – 12 bottles, so I think we sampled enough of their wines.

Next update will likely come after we arrive home unless there is magically good wifi in Athens, but that is not looking promising given the track record of internet so far.