Day 19 - Santorini

Today was our first experience with a shore excursion in a crowded environment. Santorini is a beautiful Greek island with a harbor in the center of an extinct volcano. But what happens if all the cruise ships converge on it?
It will take an hour to go from your ship to the dock. While on the tender en route to the dock, it can get as little choppy. We noticed that tourists would rather have barf bags than maps.
Who could blame them? 
All the little towns on Santorini are on top of the island. That makes getting from the dock to town a bit of an uphill climb..

Your choices are these stairs, a cable car (which usually has a long wait on busy days), a donkey or taking the tender to a further dock where you can catch a bus. We opted for the latter. It sounds smart on surface until you realize that you to wait over an hour for that special tender.
We finally grabbed our bus and headed for the ancient archeological site of Akrotiri. Some recently unearthed sections of this site are over 5000 years old.
It's pretty compelling to see, when you're upclose, everything is pretty monochromatic and boring and hot. This is especially true when the tour is an hour long. Here's what a 3000 year old kitchen looks like..
The site is very well preserved, much like Pompeii because it was covered in ash by a volcanic eruption. The mystery is that no skeletons were found. This is supposed to be an advanced ancient civilization, so maybe they had some advanced warning that the volcano was going to blow it's top.
Then it was back-on-bus to the town of Oia. (It's pronounced Eeeya it rhymes with Seeya) This is the quintessential Greek island town with whitewashed walls. It was packed with tourists from wall to wall. This is the traditional 
blue roof shot. OK... Enough shopping, Jimmie and escaped for a cold beer. Our guide, who we all felt was disorganized, redeemed herself by directing me and Jimmie to a "bakery" for a cold beer. Who knew it was a bakery with a view. 
We went back to the ship and Gina and Scott surprised us with Ouzo and Galactabouriko, which is my favorite dessert.

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