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Woke up this morning in time to have breakfast with Pete & Jen before heading back to our rooms to pack before our flight to Santorini.
Our Olympic Airways pilot is obviously a young hotted up Torana driver at heart! Never before have I been on a plane that had problems cornering whilst taxiing towards the runway.
No 10km an hour sedate meander to the runway for our pilot ... no ... we were clearly participating in some kind of Time Trial challenge that required our plane to sit on 80kms an hour at all times BEFORE speeding up to actually take off ... a rather interesting experience
We arrived in Santorini an hour after Jen & Pete who had caught the uneventful Aegean Airways flight. They had managed to find themselves a lovely little bar overlooking the runway and had taught one of the locals how to make a magarita ... sadly the receipe got somewhat lost in translation which resulted in a cocktail that could have fueled our flight back to Athens. Needless to say they were both quite merry and relaxed by the time we arrived :)
We were picked up via shuttle bus and taken into Fira - one of the main townships on Santorini. Now I knew that the site we had booked our villa off only ever lists very luxurious hotels, but I must admit that I was worried that a grecian idea of luxury may differ significantly from my own.
As we were dropped off at the top of the cliffs I must confess I was looking around trying to work out which of the least worst hotels might be ours!!
We were met by a lovely lady called brigette who advised us to follow her.
From that point on it was nothing but "omg" and "wow" and more "omg" all the way down a little windy path to the most amazing villa built into the cliff face overlooking the volcano, port of santorini, a massive cruise ship and heaps of small sail craft.
Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined the beauty of where we were ... it is just breath taking. Then we actually got to our villa ... again ... OMG and wow just don't do it justice!! to everyone that could have come with us and decided not to ... as Julia Roberts quoted in Pretty Woman .. "BIG MISTAKE".
The villa is awesome ... I'm sitting here smiling just reliving walking through the front door!!
Jen and Pete have the master bedroom .. it is after all Petes 40th birthday that we are here to celebrate ... and richie and I have the second master bedroom. There is a third bedroom, but seeing no one else wanted to come, its vacant!
I'll upload the pictures tomorrow of the view from the villa, but its breathtaking!
So we spent the afternoon at a taverna called Cafe Del Mar perched right on the top of the cliff face, watching all of the boats coming and going from the old port (for anyone that watches the news, this is the same port that a really large cruise liner sunk in just recently ... bet that captain won't be getting any contract work in the near future!!)
We then wandered out and found the local grocer, countless clothes and souvenier shops and most importantly a bottle shop.
Pete was in charge of alcohol purchases and managed to find a very oaky red, and some very different champagne ... most of which was drunk whilst overlooking the sunset from our rooftop.
During the afternoon we watched the people walk down the 3 kms of stairways to get down to the old port and then catch donkeys back up again .. something we are going to do before the week is out. We then watched teams of donkeys being led single file through the streets to where they are tethered for the night. They all wear bells on their harnesses and it was incredibly hearing them jingle through the little winding streets past our front door.
Well thats us done for the evening. Everyone was so excited to have decent internet connection that we have all be quite anti social for the last hour or so catching up on emails and of course .... I have the incredible responsibility of updating the blog so you can all live vicariously through us
I can hear the spa going in Jen and Petes room so am going to call it a night so I can avoid any awkwardness in the morning ... mind you the villa is a burrowed out cave in the side of the cliff so the walls are rather thick and relatively sound proof so maybe there will be no awkardness
For anyone interested in what our villa looks like here is a website link
http://www.luxurioushotels.net/hotels/hphotos.php?pid=4134&
see you all tomorrow xx
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