Day 1 - Travel Woes...

Hello everyone! I'm venturing into blog-land again...Here we are on our third trip to Santorini. I know that makes us sound like an elderly couple who have been to the same hotel in Skegness for 40 years, but I bloody love it and I'm so excited to explore the island more thoroughly. Also I haven't yet blogged from here, so here goes!

This entry will be quite short as we spent the entire f***ing day travelling. A journey that should have taken 6 hours ended up totalling about 11. My tip is: never travel on a Saturday if you can help it! Terminal 1 at Manchester airport was totally rammed - the queue at security was colossal as one of the two security check points was closed so we were all shepherded through one. The queue moved SO slowly that it was getting dangerously close to our flight time. A member of staff finally became available and I asked him if we could maybe bypass the huge line of people. He was v helpful and fast tracked us through, and after a panicky time negotiating our way past the utter jobsworths who work on security we ran through duty free to find...our flight was delayed. Aargh! Bloody Sleazyjet!

Over two hours later, we eventually left Manchester behind to head for beautiful, sunny Santorini. We encountered a couple more stumbling blocks...When we arrived at Santorini airport, at passport control there were a party of 4 tourists at the head of the queue who had problems with their passports. Instead of dealing with them separately after everyone else, for some reason both men working at border control centred all their attention on solving this problem. So the two flights that had just arrived at this tiny island airport were backed up, and the 300 or so passengers behind them had to wait a further 90 MINUTES to get through. Infuriating! As you may know I'm not the most patient person, so this was particularly annoying! And I needed a pee. We finally got through, and the last hurdle was getting a taxi. It's normally easy to get around the island and taxis are readily available, but because there are so many flights arriving on a Saturday it's just absolute bedlam everywhere. There were 70 flights just in one day. So there were no taxis for ages, and when one did turn up we were told we had to share with the next couple in line. We had a short but terrifying journey with a very Northern woman and a very Welsh man to our respective hotels. Terrifying because we were driving up over the mountain, and the taxi driver had his eyes glued to his phone! I was absolutely seeing my life flash before me...The only time he looked away fro his iPhone was to cross himself when we drove past a church. But we survived!

We arrived at the Memento Hotel in Perissa way past the 10pm check in, and our fears of sleeping rough for the night were allayed when the stern but efficient owner of the hotel emerged and greeted us with "Where have you BEEN?" Huzzah! She said we must just throw our luggage in the room and run round to the nearest restaurant as we must be starving. Which we were! We did as instructed, and thankfully they serve food here in Perissa until about midnight, so we just got in before the kitchen closed at a restaurant called Apollon on the sea front. I had the BIGGEST CHICKEN GYROS EVER! Which was basically a whole chicken shredded and wrapped in bread. With chips. Yummo yummo. Andrew had something vegetarian (whatevs).

So, our prolonged, painful journey paled into insignificance thanks to a lovely hotel and great Greek food and hospitality. I'm SO EXCITED to enjoy this gem of an island again. More tomorrow! I promise I won't moan as much!!xx