katiesfootprints: Greece

We are now, well were before last night, very rested, relaxed and tanned (me, not the ginger one) after ten days exploring Greece.

Our first stop was Kalambaka in the north for a couple of nights for us to go and check out the monasteries of Meteora for a day. Once upon a time, 600 years ago, there were about 31 monasteries perched high on the cliff tops of Meteora. These days, there are only about six or seven that you can actually visit and we had a good crack at it. We left it slightly too late in the morning to embark on the days adventure and ended up hiking the half an hour uphill trek in the sweltering heat to the first monastery. Not without some hilarity though – Pearce often passes the comment that I don't have reasonable reactions in some situations, and with a “watch out for snakes” warning at the front of our minds we were keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. I hear a rustling in the grass and gasp, Pearce jumps up into the nearest tree (figuratively, not literally, Emma Cave), and I realise it's just a turtle. What the? I thought turtles lived in the water, not in the mountains! Anyway, this happened another two times before we came to the conclusion that maybe there are no snakes and they are all just turtles and didn't worry about it anymore. Reasonable reaction sorted.

The monasteries were unlike anything else we have seen, very impressive and humbling places with a lot of history. After five monasteries and having walked a good 10km we were finally at the last and largest (and furtherest away from home) monastery when the weather suddenly took a turn for the worse. We decided to gap it and coincidentally got caught in the middle of a lightning storm and torrential rain. I was slightly fearful about how close the lightning was to us but Pearce reckoned it was still a couple of k's away... “you can tell by counting how many seconds between the lightning and the thunder and each second is a kilometre” he explains, just as lightning strikes right in front of us followed immediately by thunder. “If I die, tell my mum I love her” we exchange as we run along. But a couple of minutes later, laughing hysterically at our predicament and absolutely saturated, we were picked up by some Frenchies who very kindly dropped us at our hotel.

The next day we were Greek Island bound, Ios first up. Not a lot of deviation from the norm to report here; eating lots, drinking lots, sunning ourselves lots, swimming lots and exploring a little bit. Ios is a giant rock, there's not much else to it, but the water was pristine so we made the most of that.

After a few days we caught a ferry to Santorini. Disappointment ensued when we pulled into our “beachfront” hotel that was two kilometres from the beach - I had to strop about that for a while, before we headed out in search of dinner down at the beach. On the walk back home we were introduced to our first Greek God – S.T. Santorini Thunder (S.T) was a 50cc quad bike who was a legend in his own right. A top speed of 56kph on a steep down hill was counteracted by his crawling pace of 9kph on the uphill, and he only had one gear - forward. We spent the next two days exploring all over the island with S.T, watching the sunset in the villages of Oia and Pyrgos, sampling wines in wineries, sunning and bathing at the beaches, dining in Fira and Perissa, and getting massages seaside. We even managed to fit one tourist thing in by visiting the 3500 year old ruins of Akrotiri. I got a bit sad when we had to give S.T back, but we had to say our goodbyes because we were off to Athens.

Unfortunately Athens had been talked down to us a fair bit and we'd only booked the one day there so we needed to make the most of it. We found our perfectly located hostel and the bar on top of it just in time for happy hour, followed our noses to the best burgers in town and then parked up at the sports bar to watch some Olympics. In the morning we went on a walking tour around the city and then visited the Acropolis Museum and the Acropolis and Parthenon itself – our hostel being a stones throw from every major attraction in Athens. I discovered that a marathon is still run over the exact path the first marathon was run – from Marathon (where else?!) to Athens (finishing up in the stadium the first modern Olympics were held in) – and set myself a goal. Katie. Marathon. Greece. October 2013 - watch this space. The rest of the evening played out about the same as the night before, sky bar for happy hour, burgers for dinner, sports bar for Olympics, which then turned into a very late night of terrible Karaoke with new found friends.

Average temperature has been early thirties and water consumption is about 1L every two hours. So blimmen hot! We were up at 5.30 this morning to catch our flight and I've just been frisked and bag searched at Athens Airport (again, it's always me that gets searched) and we are Budapest bound!

Email is back up and running, unfortunately my gmail account got hacked yesterday so apologies to anyone who got spammed by that. That's back up and running now too.

Monastery in Meteora

You've probably already seen this one, but worth repeating! Ios was dreamy.

Slammer Bar - Ios. Put helmet on, have shot, get slammed over the head.

Sunset from Oia, Santorini

Me and S.T at the beach.

This is a Santorini Vineyard - it is so windy on this island, so they are kept low to the ground and grow like a bush, all the grapes are in the middle.