Santorini, Greece

It seems like I’ve always wanted to go to Santorini, Greece. About 20 years ago, I saw Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel do an episode on Santorini and I was hooked. It always seemed like it would be too far to go and I had other places closer that I wanted to see. When we moved to Italy, I realized just how close Greece was to us and it would be just a short couple of flights, so I booked it! It did not disappoint! Or as Andy would say, “It didn’t suck”!

We stayed in Oia (EE-AH) in a canava hotel. Most of the hotels are canavas. These are the white cave like houses built into the cliffs. The sailors and fishermen used to live there. The ship captain and owners lived in mansion type houses built on top of the cliffs. The view from our room was AMAZING! Santorini is a live volcano and we had a view of the caldera. We sat on our patio and just enjoyed the view a lot! The hotel served us our breakfast every morning our our patio. It was a little chilly but the view was worth it!

The weather was sunny but cool and really windy. One day of our stay it was supposed to be less windy and warmer so we booked a catamaran sailing cruise around the island. It was so nice to get out on the water and see Santorini from a different view. The volcanic ash makes the water dark so you don’t see the turquoise blue water like you would see in the Caribbean. The iron, sulfur, and limestone from the volcano made beautiful red, black and white beaches.

When we go on vacation we want to relax, eat and drink the local flavors and sight see at our own pace. We usually don’t do tours. While on the catamaran we met a family from Long Island, NY and they told us about the Eat & Walk Santorini Food Tour that they had done. We decided to try it the next day and we had so much fun! We started out with Greek coffee, did some olive oil tasting, wine and beer tasting and of course tasted a lot of local specialties all while walking through Fira.

Greek food is delicious! Our guide was really fun and knowledgeable and the group we were with was fun too! We will definitely look for food walking tours in other places we travel to.

Santorini was a wonderful place to visit. We enjoyed the luxurious accommodations, the stunning scenery, the fun food tour, the catamaran and most of all the food! One of our top favorite meals we have ever eaten was at Fino in Oia. We ate dinner there one night and the food and cocktails were so amazing that we actually cancelled dinner plans elsewhere another night so we could go back there and eat again before we left!