Awesome Adventure 2016: Santorini - Armeni, Fira and Thirasia

Some more to see plus time to relax. Sophie and I had a quiet start on Friday, with Sophie catching up on her blog. In the meantime, John and Will (who had too much energy for his own good), went for a reconnaissance walk to Armeni Beach. We all then went down to the same beach in the afternoon. It had been quiet when John and Will visited but in the afternoon, several tourist sailing ships called in and the passengers were transferred up to Oia by mule. We still had a nice swim on the small and rocky harbour beach. There were several nice types of fish but we didn't see many parrot fish like at Kamari Beach. We met an Australian who was staying down at Armeni for the week.

The following day, we decided to use our museum passes before they expired. John and I had bought 14 euro museum passes (kids are free) when we visited Akrotiri and they only last for 4 days. We went to the Archaeological Museum on Saturday morning and then followed up with a trip to the Museum of Prehistoric Thira in the afternoon. Neither museum was particularly large, but packed with some special artifacts. The first museum mostly contained items from Ancient Thira (6th century BC) whereas the Prehistoric museum contained items from Akrotiri (17th century BC). Sophie and Will even managed to find a McDonalds for lunch. We picked up a few souvenirs before heading home. We then went up the hill to watch the sunset.

On Sunday, we caught the boat across to Thirasia, the other section of the crater rim that we have been looking across at all week. We were down at Ammoudi Bay by 7.30am to make sure that we didn't miss the boat - a trip that involved about 150 steps up into town and 250ish down to the harbour. We had expected to disembark at the second stop on the island but almost everyone got off at the first. I had a chat to a Greek woman who recognised us from selling Will a hat but we couldn't work out for sure where it was best to be dropped off. We ended up doing an approx. 7 km walk across the island to the other harbour. The work was worthwhile, as we went past vineyards and mule breeder's fields - with a stabled donkey making a terrible braying noise! The climb to the centre of the island along the road was very steep - but there wasn't too much complaining. The reward was drinks at Corfos on the other side and even an ice cream for Sophie and Will before boarding the boat again at midday. Will and I put our legs in the water and we walked around the bay as far as we could but we didn't have a swim. We then did some exploring at Ammoudi Bay for a possible swim tomorrow and then bought some peaches from a path-side stall. We walked up to the bus station at Oia for Giros for a late lunch.