Santorini

Click here to read about the first few days of our trip.

Sunday, October 3
We arrived in Athens around 9 am on Sunday morning and after collecting our bag and going through customs we headed to the information booth to inquire about catching a flight to Santorini.

After being pointed to a travel agency booth, we end up paying around 120 euro each for our one way flight to Santorini.  That’s a little more than we would have paid through an online site, but again, we didn’t know ahead of time which day we would actually need to book the flight for.

We chose the flight over the ferry because even though the ferry was cheaper, it would have taken about 8 hours.  We hopped a plane at 11 am and by noon we were touching down in Santorini.

In an effort to save money, we decided to take the bus into town even though everyone else on our flight had opted for a cab or been picked up by their hotels.  After waiting almost 45 minutes with no bus in sight, we decide we didn’t fly 4,000 miles to spend our vacation at a bus stop so we took a 30 euro cab ride into town.

Even though we had not booked any hotels for our trip, that doesn’t mean we hadn’t done our research.  I had used TripAdvisor to pick out several promising hotels so we arrived in Oia and headed for our first pick.  No vacancy.

A friend had highly recommended a place in Firostefani so we took the bus over there.  The hotel our friend recommended was closed for the season.  So we wandered aimlessly looking for a place to stay.  It was hot and I was lugging around our backpack so I was ready to find a place and settle in.

Eventually we stumbled on the perfect place (Hotel Galini) which ended up being cheaper than our first pick would have been.  100 euros a night.  After all the hot and unproductive wandering we had done we were ready to take just about any place that had a room.  So we were pretty much sold even before they showed us the view.  It was breathtaking.  We signed up for 3 nights.

After cooling off and cleaning up, we headed out to explore Firostefani and then Fira.  We ended up paying too much for dinner that first night, but it was mostly because we didn’t know where anything was and we ended up paying the price for a caldera-view with dinner.  It was a little splurge for our first night in Santorini.  I think dinner was about $75 in US dollars.

Monday, October 4
The weather was still perfect on Monday, so we decided it would be a beach day.  We saved money by taking the bus to the beach and we bought groceries from the market for breakfast and lunch.  All that money we saved was soon wasted when we ended up having to spend almost $25 US on sunscreen because we didn’t pack any.  For some reason we were under the impression that we wouldn’t need any in early October.  Wrong.

The beach was great and it was hot enough that it felt great to hop in the cool water and swim around.  After a long day at the beach, we headed back to town on the bus and stopped for dinner at a gyro place.  We were pleasantly surprised to find out that these not only tasted awesome, but they were ridiculously cheap.  We pretty much decided right there that we would probably be eating a lot more gyros on this trip.

After dinner we stopped in a travel agency and bought ferry tickets for Wednesday when we would be heading to Naxos.  We also bought boat tour tickets for Tuesday which would take us to the volcano and hot springs.

Tuesday, October 5

We woke up and grabbed a bite to eat at a cafe.  Then we went to meet our bus that was taking us to the boat for our tour.  Well, no bus ever came.  After waiting for 45 minutes, we headed over to the travel agency to see what happened.  I was afraid we were going to be out a hundred bucks or so but they were totally awesome and apologized and gave us a refund.  We decided to book a different tour that was scheduled for that afternoon.

It worked out perfect.  We grabbed a gyro for lunch and headed to the port to meet our boat.  The boat took us out to the volcano where we were allowed to get out and hike around.  After hiking to the top and then back to the boat, we were taken to a hot springs area.  The sea here is supposedly heated by the active volcano, but we jumped off the boat and swam around and it wasn’t all that warm.

Overall, I’d say the boat tour was a little bit of a disappointment but it was nice to get off the island and to see the island from the sea.  It was also nice to actually have something to do rather than just wandering around some more.  It turns out that we ended up being quite happy that we missed the first tour because we saved money and we felt like this tour was just about the right length.  The first one was scheduled to be almost 3 hours longer.

Arriving back at port, we paid 5 euros each for the chance to ride a donkey back to the top of the cliffs and I thought that was totally worth it.  We saved ourselves a hike up 600-some stairs and we have an unforgettable memory of the donkey ride.

Can’t remember what we did for dinner that night but I know we were treated to yet another incredible sunset.  Every night they were awesome!

Wednesday, October 6
We hopped on a bus to the port in the morning and then boarded our ferry to Naxos.

Looking over my notes, it looks like we spent right around 750 euros for our 3 days in Santorini.  We knew going in that Santorini was going to be the most expensive of the islands and it was.  We knew it was the most popular island and the most touristy, so we had planned to spend a little more here and hopefully we’d make up some savings on the other islands.

Of course there are things we could have done smarter/cheaper.  We could have booked our airfare to Santorini online for cheaper.  If we would have booked a hotel ahead of time, we could have arranged a pickup from the airport to save us the cab fare.  We also could have probably picked an even cheaper hotel.  We could have brought sunscreen from home.  We could have bought more groceries instead of eating out, but we like to eat out on vacation so I don’t feel bad about that at all.

There were a few ways we saved including:  We bought groceries for some meals.  We didn’t do much shopping for touristy junk that we didn’t need.  Though we did keep up the tradition of buying a Christmas ornament in all the places we vacation.  We took the bus a lot instead of renting a car or ATV or cab. Those are just a few examples I can think of off the top of my head.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with our spending for the first leg of our trip.