The last of our trip

Family at Epidavros

Gyros come with fries!

Liz loving that she is in Santorini

Fira from our coffee stop

View of Oia

Liz and Terry hiking up the caldera

Last sunset on Santorini 

From Monemvasia we drove to Nafplio. Liz drove the last part of the way to Monemvasia on roads that weren't as crazy as what we had been on before so I decided to give driving in Greece a chance. Yes, I know that I just said I wouldn't drive - but I did pay the 15 dollars for an international drivers license, so I thought I might as well. But let me tell you, I don't drive stick very often. I think of it as in theory i know how to drive a stick, but it really isn't a pretty site. I think the last time I drove a stick shift it was for all of 10mins, late on a Sunday night, coasting through every yellow light in downtown Seattle. Before that, the most I had driven was with my drive with Terry to Montana (8+ years ago!). I thought I would drive for 10mins and call it good, but before I knew it we had hit a small town. Yeeeek! I managed to drive for about an hour and went through two small towns before deciding that Terry should take over before I drove into a small city. Other than Terry reminding me that I I needed to stay more to the left, because I was too close to the parked cars on the right hand side, I did just fine. I may have been swearing, and thought that if I somehow sucked in air, the car would magically get smaller to fit in-between some of the car/streets (think Harry Potter and the knight bus). At least where I drove i didn't have to worry about falling down the side of cliffs or hairpin turns. However, I did have to work on not taking out other vehicles. Yet, I only stalled a handful of times! And a few of those times where in one of the towns when I got flustered by someone trying to turn into me when I had the right away. It was quite the experience and I think both Liz and I are happy that Terry did most of the driving.

So this whole time driving around the iPad has been very, very, handy with navigation. However, I got Terry into a small bind while using the map on the iPad to direct us to our hotel in Nafplio. After finding the road we wanted to take was blocked, I had this idea to go down another street... Well, it was just wide enough for our car but we got to a dead end where Terry had to back down the street a few blocks until there was a space for him to do a five point turn to turn around. We quickly figured out that you don't even try to drive in the old town in Nafplio. We made it to the hotel only to find that Rick Steve's didn't lie when he said it had a lot of stairs. This is when I wish I had brought a backpack and not a roller bag for luggage.

The next day we headed to Epidavros and Mykines. The highlight of Epidavros was listening to Terry belt out Mercedes Benz by Janis Joplin at the theater of Epidavros! This was one of the old theaters that has great acoustics even if you were in the nose bleed sections. He got an applause and when we went to Mykines a German tour group who had been in Epidavros even commented on Terry's singing and how they recognized that it was Janis Joplin.

After driving back to Athens we caught our flight to Santorini. I think we all were expecting a little time to relax at the end of our trip but we still found that we were go go go. So much to see and so little time. We stayed outside the main town of Fira in Imerovigli. It was a quite town were we had a little studio with a great view of the caldera. One day we walked into Fira and explored. We also had 5 euro cappuccino freddos - we were paying for the amazing view because the coffee sure wasn't worth that much. We even walked down all 500+ steps to the old port. On the way we said hello to the donkeys and then took the cable car back to the top. We also checked out the other main town Oia. Everyday between two and five cruise ships would be in Santorini - it was a amazing to watch them come in, but made the towns very crowed. On our last day we took a boat tour to see the towns from a different view, walk around the volcano, swim in sulfur hot springs, and eat lunch on the island of Thirasia. In all three towns that we explored in Santorini I think my favorite part was taking my camera and going down the plethora of staircases seeing what i could capture.

Our trip has now come to an end. Three weeks went very quickly. We had beautiful and very hot weather all but the last day of our trip. The night before leaving Santorini it rained and there was a big thunder and lighting storm. Talk about some intense lighting and thunder! If we hadn't had to get up so early we would have stayed up to watch it. We were rudely awakened the next morning by our ride to the airport showing up 45 minutes early and waking us up. It sort of felt like Home Alone where the electricity goes off and the family sleeps in. However, we didn't sleep in, and our Greek driver didn't get that he was early! Talk about packing fast and rushing out the door. But even 10 hrs later we still think we packed everything.