Today we woke up and it was sunny and beautiful outside! What a difference a day makes! We ate outside for breakfast overlooking the caldera and the islands off of Santorini. It was beautiful. We decided since the weather was so nice we wanted to go on a boat ride around the island. We found one that had availability for their "sunset cruise" that left at 3pm. So we had a while to take a walk around Oia and take some pictures. Kevin was able to find the spot to recreate the picture that made me want to come to Santorini, it has all the white houses with the 3 blue domed churches in the mix. It was great to finally find it! After a nice walk and some more photos we relaxed a bit at the hotel before getting picked up for our cruise.

We boarded our catamaran with 5 other couples and set off for the opposite (southern) tip of the island. On our way we passed by the volcano that created the island and the surroundings ~3000 years ago that is no longer active. There is another volcano that is part of a very small island that is still active and erupted over 60 years ago. Because it is still active there are hot springs coming into the sea from the volcano. One of the things you can do on the cruise is swim in the hot springs. What they don't tell you before you're all excited to go, is that you need to swim 100 yards through freezing cold, early spring, Aegean Sea water, before getting to the luke warm bath water that they call the hot springs! It was still fun and we were glad we did it, but boy was that first jump in the water cold!

After swimming we continued to the southern tip of the island where we saw the red, white and black beaches. They are different colors based upon the different makeup of the earth/sand around them. It was interesting that they were quite close together, we saw all three in the matter of about 5 minutes, but so different! Then we hit up one more swim spot where the crew said we could snorkel while they finished up making dinner. Kevin was the first brave one to jump in and everyone else asked him if he was able to see anything. He could not and it was cold, so he ended up being the guinea pig and no one else jumped in at the last stop! By the time Kevin got out we were ready to eat. The crew had made a delicious meal of fried fish, grilled prawns, grilled chicken, Greek salad, spicy cheese spread, tzatziki sauce, spaghetti and bread. We were definitely not going to go hungry! We tried everything but the spaghetti and it was all delicious.

After dinner we started to slowly make our way back toward Oia and the sunset. The sky had been clear most of the day and made for lovely pictures and nice warm sunshine after our swim, but it clouded up on our way back. By the time we go to Oia the sky was mostly clouded over, but we still watched as the sun went behind the clouds hoping to glimpse a little of the famous Santorini sunsets.

We all loaded back into the vans that brought us to the dock and headed back up to our hotels. We made our way back to ours and took another dip in the hot tub, which was WAY hotter after we asked them to turn it up a little bit. Now it's off to bed and we are hoping for clear skies again tomorrow so we can do the caldera hike!

Keely