Santorini.....sigh

Jet lag is an insidious thing. I have been home for several days and I am still falling asleep in the chair in the living room by 7 p.m. only to find myself wide awake at 3 a.m. So I will continue this blog about Greece.

We got off the ship at Santorini feeling exhausted from a week of traveling in Greece. As the driver took us from the port to our hotel our blood pressures decreased immediately. The driver stopped in a parking lot on a hill in Imerovigli, tried to put our two suitcases on his shoulders and took off down a narrow staircase towards our hotel. He was met halfway by the desk clerk at the Sunny Villas hotel. The desk clerk grabbed our bags and started off at a run down the staircase. Bryan and I were trying desperately to keep up with him but we kept losing him. We would be unsure of which way to go and then the man's head would pop back around a corner and say, "This way." We lost him four times in the descent to our hotel.

Sunny Villas is perched on the side of the cliff, as are many, many hotels on Santorini. When the desk clerk led us to our villa we were astounded. When he gave us a tour of our villa, built into the side of the cliff, we were overwhelmed. When he said, "...and this is your second bathroom" we wanted to move in permanently.

There was no rushing around on Santorini. The bus system there doesn't make that possible. So we just relaxed, sighed and watched the sky and the caldera from our villa and private balcony. The front window of the villa had four large panes of glass that could be moved to the side for a completely unobstructed view of paradise. Every morning we would get up, roll the windows to the side and eat a Greek breakfast while the breeze blew through that open space. I had told the desk clerk I wished I had brought a CD to listen to on the stereo in our villa. He gave me a CD he had and said, "This is the best music in all of Greece." I would call it Greek classical music. I listened to it 8 times while I was there, staring out at the beauty around me.

At night we would sit on the balcony, eat pistachios and wonder how each sunset could be so beautiful.

Each day we made an excursion:

a ride in the cable cars down to the port

sitting on the black sand beach in Kamari

eating waffles overlooking the caldera from Oia

hiking the cliff walk from Fira to Imerovigli

On the morning we checked out I went into the office at Sunny Villas with a sad look on my face. The desk clerk said, "Did you like it here?" "Loved it," I said. "I bet you never want to leave," he said. "I could live here," I said. He said, "You know, the funny thing is, I have spent my whole life trying to figure out how to get off this island." Behind his head, on the filing cabinet, was a magnet from California. I guess the grass is always greener....or the caldera always bluer...on the other side of the ocean.