Fifth Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket, West, Round One, Part Two

#6 Murray State Racers vs. #11 Colorado State Rams

Both schools here have an actual, living mascot, which I think makes me a little uncomfortable about speculating about which one would win in a fight to the death.

Not so uncomfortable that I won’t proceed, though.


Murray State’s got Racer One, a disappointingly generically named Thoroughbred who makes me think we’re playing an arcade game from the early 90s. Cruis’n USA, maybe. Racer One apparently runs around the field following a touchdown, which isn’t relevant here, but is more interesting than sitting in stable all day getting fat off of the flesh of other mascots.

Colorado State’s got CAM the Ram, a bighorn sheep with an initialism for a name and some ridiculously curved horns.



Note: Sheep pupils are rectangular and I may or may not have an irrational fear of them.

So, yes, CAM would likely be able to cause some damage by headbutting Racer One, but he’s still a sheep, while Racer One’s filled with adrenaline from getting HBO to stop production on Luck. Plus, Racer One’s presumably got metal on his hooves, which seems like it’d hurt.

Murray State advances

#3 Marquette Golden Eagles vs. #14 Iona Gaels

I’m sorry. I’ve been doing this for years, and every time I get to Marquette, all I can see is this.



I know. They were the Screaming Eagles. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

It’s a little ridiculous, as Golden Eagles exist and seem to be able to fend for themselves pretty well without assistance from Jerry Van Dyke and Bill Fagerbakke, while Screaming Eagles are, I’m pretty sure, what you see when you have some sort of horrible drug interaction.

Falconry appears to have been practiced more widely among the Saxons than the Gaels, so Iona’s not going to be able to rely on simply being able to control the Golden Eagles, and I’m unfamiliar with any origin story that makes Hawkman a Gael (Ancient Egyptian prince or Space Policeman from Thanagar, sure, but never Gaelic). They did have weapons, though, while the eagle is going to have to try to rip apart its big creepy head.

I don’t see that happening, especially with all those damned teeth.

Iona advances

#7 Florida Gators vs. #10 Virginia Cavaliers

Cavman seems skeptical.



I assume he’s trying to figure out whether the right side of his hat is meant to evoke a feather or some sort of ridiculous fur trim.

Alligators are intimidating in that “reptiles shouldn’t be that large or keen on eating people” sort of way, and they’re at least somewhat more appropriate in Florida, where I understand they exist, than as the mascot for my alma mater, where they don’t.

On the other hand, the Cavalier explicitly has a sword, which gives him some range over the Gator and, I think, is enough for a victory.

Virginia advances

#2 Missouri Tigers vs. #15 Norfolk State Spartans

If nothing else, this is a better matchup than the Spartan/Blackbird match earlier this round. There aren’t tigers in Laconia as far as I know, so it’s possible that the Spartans wouldn’t quite know what to do with a tiger.

On the other hand, Tru, the Missouri Mascot looks like this:



I don’t know what it is, but that looks like the most vulnerable tiger I’ve ever seen. I think maybe the stripe above his eyes? Like he’s pleading for approval. And I’d like to give it to him, but this bracket is about survival and fighting prowess and utter nonsense, so I’ll assume the Spartan’s well trained enough to pull this off.

I’m sorry, Tru. It’s ok. I’ll get you some ice cream. Maybe next year.

Norfolk State advances

Fifth Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket - West, Round One, Part One

Quick note: The remaining first round sets will be split to avoid ludicrously long posts. And so I can sleep.

#1 Michigan State Spartans vs. #16 LIU Blackbirds
I think I’ve gotten to the point where I can hear “Spartan” and not have Gerard Butler be the only thing that comes to mind. I think that’s probably the romantic comedies at work; my Peloponnesian history isn’t what it should be, so I don’t know exactly how ancient Spartans would have responded to The Bounty Hunter, but I have to assume it wouldn’t have been pretty.

Spartan McNulty is displeased.

The Blackbirds, on the other hand, probably aren’t going to fare well against a guy with a sword wearing a cuirass. They’re fine as something for Paul McCartney to sing about, and seem to be pretty good at pestering Jon Snow for corn, but against an actual military unit, I’m afraid that the birds aren’t going to fare well.


Yes, I’m sorry. It’s ok. You can be even more dour now.


Michigan State advances.

#8 Memphis Tigers vs. #9 Saint Louis Billikens





So that’s a Billiken, then. I was really worried that I was missing something really basic about what in the world this is supposed to be, but Introduction to Charm Doll Fads of the Early 1900s That Appeared In the Dreams of an Art Teacher wasn’t required for my major, so it’s an area in which I know I’m deficient. It’s evidently a good luck… thing, which is good as something tells me that if the Billiken deems it, things can go south in a hurry. Then suddenly the Brady Bunch has to go back to St. Louis to return the Billiken because Bobby can’t leave well enough alone and it turns into a weird parable about how we have to care for and preserve St. Louis.

The Tigers are Tigers, I guess, but for some reason I assume the Billiken’s got anti-Tiger powers. Which would actually explain the 2006 World Series, so let’s run with that.

Saint Louis advances.

#5 New Mexico Lobos vs. #12 Long Beach State 49ers

We could sit here and debate the positives and the negatives of the California Gold Rush, but we won’t, because I don’t feel like reading enough about it to have a strong opinion one way or the other. I am relatively certain that Long Beach wasn’t involved in any actual gold rushing.

The Lobos, on the other hand have, presumably, Lobo.


This is what Glenn Danzig sees when he looks in the mirror.

I’m not sure what the 49ers have in the way of weaponry (Gold pans? Sieves? Maybe a pickaxe?), but I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it won’t quite match up to the 1990s distilled into a single ridiculous character.

New Mexico advances.

#4 Louisville Cardinals vs. #13 Davidson Wildcats

I’ve already dealt with both Cardinals and Wildcats, and neither is terribly threatening. The Louisville Cardinal (somewhat disappointingly just named “Cardinal Bird”) has teeth, which is starting to make me think I’m wrong and that cardinals have teeth. I don’t think they do, but it’s such a consistent feature that it’s unsettling.



I don’t feel cheer from Cardinal Bird. I feel like I’ve wronged him.

The Wildcats, on the other hand, have this big grey thing with whiskers and detached cheeks? Or something? Gills? It does have little tufts of hair coming out of the tops of its ears, which makes me think they’re going for some kind of lynx, but frankly, I’m just sort of confused.



Deciding between the two entirely on which one I wouldn’t want to have cut off in traffic, I’ll have to give this to Cardinal Bird. He’s got a lot of anger, and I think that probably is the deciding factor in this.

Louisville advances.

Fifth Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket, South, Round One

#1 Kentucky Wildcats vs. #16 Western Kentucky Hilltoppers

You know, I think I've probably been a little rough on Wildcats over the past few years. I'd been running with the "thing that's the same size as a domestic cat and mostly only tries to kill things smaller than it" definition without even considering the Lynx, which is at least somewhat larger, or the Bobcat. Or professional wrestler Wildcat Chris Harris. All completely legitimate interpretations, and there's really no excuse for having excluded those as possibilities to this point.


I’ll just stay over here, thanks. No. It’s not you. It’s me.

On the other hand, no matter what definition of wildcat I'm running with (like, say, the 1986 Goldie Hawn vehicle that was apparently the debut of Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson), the sad truth of the matter is that this wildcat had the poor fortune to run into Western Kentucky and I'm unreasonably excited about Big Red being back in the tournament. Big Red seems to be larger than most of the actual cats, and so probably wouldn't be targeted as prey and that professional wrestler I just found out exists is still a mere mortal. He'll have to sleep at some point, which is when I imagine Big Red will bound joyfully from the shadows to put this match to an end.

Western Kentucky advances

#8 Iowa State Cyclones vs. #9 Connecticut Huskies

Huskies are great. They're big, energetic dogs and I get the feeling that if I ever found myself in the arctic wilderness with a sled and a pack of huskies, I would die immediately because I am utterly clueless about how to handle that situation and they'd run away to safety, but they probably wouldn't be too condescending about the whole experience.

Really, it's remarkable that there exist a number of sports which amount to "tie dogs to mode of transit and have them run", if only for the jargon. Take the opening sentence from the Wikipedia article on "Bikejoring".

"Bikejoring is a dog mushing activity related to skijoring, canicross, and dog scootering."

Oh! Of course! Just like canicross and dog scootering. I'm glad we're all on the same page.

Cyclones, on the other hand, are a destructive force of nature. I was considering counting them out simply because of the recent tornado outbreak that's actually caused a lot of damage across the midwest because tornadoes can go to hell, but wasn't sure how to work around that if this is supposed to be mascot combat.

The solution is somehow a bird with teeth.

That’s where we are as a society.


Happily, Iowa State did that for me, because despite being named the Cyclones, their mascot is a Cardinal named Cy, who's apparently won some National Mascot Awards in a world where that is a thing that exists. As discussed previously, cardinals are certainly not a force of nature. They eat seeds. They're occasionally loud. They're easy to distinguish from the background. If it's mascot vs. mascot, Jonathan the Husky takes this in a walk.

Connecticut advances.

#12 Virginia Commonwealth Rams vs. #5 Wichita State Shockers
I like that after five years of doing this, I’m still finding mascots where I’ve got no idea what the hell they are. The Shockers were last in the tournament in 2006, just before I started doing this, and I’m woefully underprepared with regards to the Missouri Valley Conference. And so here we are.

Apparently, “Shockers” refers to early students shocking the wheat fields, which is what you call harvesting wheat fields if you’re a late 90’s Mountain Dew commercial. I’m going to assume WuShock has got some sort of electrical powers, like a second rate, more wheat-centric Black Lightning.


Black Lightning’s also got much better lapels.

The Rams seem a little mundane in comparison. Sure, they’ve got the big horns and the standing around and chewing grass (though I’m sure they might chew wheat if they had to), and I guess I could twist things around to construe them as some sort of battering ram, but I have no idea what Wichita has in the way of fortified city walls. I do know that I’ll jump on any chance to post a Toasters song.


Wichita State advances.

#4 Indiana Hoosiers vs. #13 New Mexico State Aggies

Good on New Mexico State for actually having a character to go along with the ever-present “Aggie” nickname. Sure, he’s got a jaunty vest and he makes me feel a little like I might have cheated him at poker without realizing it, but he’s present and I don’t have to make up some nonsense about the relative merits of students of Agricultural and Mechanical Colleges.



And what a moustache.

Hoosiers, as ever, are residents of Indiana. For the purposes of this matchup, let’s assume that’s Red Skelton. Now, Vaudevillians are frightening, but look at this. Does this look like the face of someone who’s going to deal well with Tom Selleck, New Mexico Ranger?



I sort of want to make the guy a pie.

Yeah, unarmed Red Skelton isn’t going to fair well here.

New Mexico State advances

#6 UNLV Rebels vs. #11 Colorado Buffaloes

I thought, when I was first looking through the bracket, that this wouldn’t really be a matter of who would win, but how accurate of a shot Hey Reb is behind his awesome, possibly sentient moustache. And then I finally got around to looking up what the actual mascot looks like.



Oh hey, it’s the last thing you see before you die. Terrific.


I’m not sure whether it’s the soulless eyes, or the barely visible yet still threatening teeth, or the goalie gloves. The moustache and hat don’t even come into it. There’s only one true response to Hey Reb. And that is to run as fast as you can. I’m sorry Buffaloes. It’s you or me, and I’ve got matchups to write.

UNLV advances

#3 Baylor Bears vs. #14 South Dakota State Jackrabbits
Interesting choice by South Dakota State, loading up on dexterity and putting basically nothing into strength. I guess the goal here would be to stay the hell away from the Baylor Bear until he gets bored and wanders into an active minefield just to feel alive.

The Jackrabbits do appeal to me, not because I’ve ever been to South Dakota, but in that I’m going to presume they were named in tribute to the wooden coaster at Kennywood. But even there, it winds up playing it too safe. Sure, it’s got the lift hill in the middle of the ride and a double dip (without which it’d be a even more toned down version of Racer without the Racing), but if this were a matchup between the Baylor Bears and the South Dakota State Thunderbolts, we’d have a matchup both in the Vengance of Zeus sense and the “Liable to cause internal injuries if you’re sitting on the wrong side” sense. Sadly, that’s not what we’ve got here, and there’s no way a straight up Jackrabbit/Bear fight ends in anything but calls to the next of kin of the rabbit.

Baylor advances.

#7 Notre Dame Fighting Irish vs. #10 Xavier Musketeers

So the Xavier mascot is this guy.

He’s not actually cheerleading here. He’s just trying to tell anyone who will listen about the great deal he got on those boots.

As far as big foam rubber humans go, that’s actually pretty mild. He’s got puffy sleeves and a big goofy goatee, and he seems to be a French musketeer, which is a shame because the Xavier Redcoats would have filled this matchup with unintended political overtones. Presumably, the guy was selected from a pool of potential musketeers for his prowess in musketing, which is a hard field to get into but pays off with great benefits and the ability to wear culottes in public without getting harassed over it. The Fighting Irish on the other hand, have gone with a leprechaun instead of, say, a big, foam rubber Charles Stewart Parnell. Sure, he’s got that shillelagh, but the musketeer by definition has a musket, and I don’t know if a leprechaun’s abilities include being able to bat musket balls out of the air.

I don’t think that’s part of the package.

Xavier advances

#2 Duke Blue Devils vs. #15 Lehigh Mountain Hawks

And we’ve reached the part of the year where I don’t know what the hell to do with Duke. They’re either Australian flowers, French mountain infantry, a jazz band from Oklahoma or depression. Only one of those has any actual combat training, and that one (regretfully) isn’t the one that Count Basie used to be involved with. Mountain Hawks, as near as I can tell, are eagles native to the Indian subcontinent, which isn’t near Bethlehem, PA, but at least they’ve got the decency to be one easily identifiable thing.

They’re also called “Hodgson’s Hawk-Eagle”, which makes me think Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot might be involved, which fills me with glee.

Joel Hodgson, Benevolent Dictator

Just for that, actually, and because there’s a (slight) possibility that the Blue Devils might be a flower, Lehigh advances.

Fifth Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket - Play In Round

Every year I think I'll probably skip out on doing the mascot bracket because it's obnoxiously huge, takes up way too mch time and now that I'm actually gainfully employed, has basically no hope of being up in its entirety before Thursday when the tournament kicks off in earnest.

But every year, someone says something vaguely encouraging right before it's time to start this and I wind up spending a week writing frantically to break down completely meaningless matcups pitting one mascot against another in a fight to the death. Or whatever's more amusing to me. If I do the play in round (which I'd planend to skip but can't given the participants), there's 67 matchups, which means I'm thinking about mascots more than is probably healthy. Nonetheless, I was told I should do this, and it seems like a good way to force myself to post something again. So we're going to have the 5th Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket. I'll try to interlink these posts as much as possible, so that if you're somehow coming into this late, you'll be able to determine how we've gotten where we are. I'm not promising that this'll be up in time to use as an actual bracket this year. You shouldn't use this as your guide for filling out your bracket if you have paid someone money for the privilege of filling out a bracket, as this is nonsense.

Hold on to your Hilltoppers, folks.

Post #1 - Play In Round

#16 Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils vs. #16 Western Kentucky Hilltoppers
Before starting this bracket, I'd more or less decided that I wouldn't be including the play-in round. Most bracket pools don't ask you to predict them, and skipping over the round entirely would shave four rounds off this writeup and give me a fighting chance at getting it all up before the tournament's over. And then I saw who the first play in round involves.



WHEE-HAH

I missed you, Western Kentucky. For my money, there's not a mascot in the NCAA who is more of a gleeful muppet than Big Red. Between his giant Pac-Man head and inexplicable thigh-pocket, Big Red inspires joy and unrelenting terror in all of us, depending on whether you have any hope of escape. The Delta Devils are fine, I guess, and I'msure they've got some sort of supernatural evil/mischeivous powers that could cause some trouble if I were letting them past this first round, but they also remind me of Delta Burke and Designing Women was never particularly threatening. If the name somehow evoked Jean Smart or Meshach Taylor, we might be on to something, but I really don't see how that's going to be enough to get me to advance Mississippi Valley State past Big Red and the Hilltoppers (which had better be the name of a student-run Big Band somewhere in Western Kentucky.)

Western Kentucky Hilltoppers advance, and the commonfolk rejoice.

#14 Brigham Young Cougars vs. #14 Iona Gaels

One nice thing about doing the play in round is that allows me to learn about schools and their accompanying mascots that I had no idea existed before. There's only so much I can come up with about, say, the Duke Blue Devils before I feel like I'm repeating myself from previous years (which probably doesn't matter as I'm guessing I lack multi-year readers, but feels wrong). Enter the Iona Gaels. It turns out that Iona is an island in the Inner Hebrides off the coast of Scotland, in addition to being a Catholic University in New Rochelle (which I believe is where The Dick Van Dyke Show is set). I wish I could give them points for the whiskey and puffins that inhabit the former, but according to the rules of the bracket that I'm making up on the spot, I can't.

Listen, cougars are big and terrifying, and I have no idea if pointing to another wall with a laser pointer is at all effective. I'm guessing it's not. I'd get into whether the Iona mascot has weapons, but, well, look at this.

GIVE IT WHATEVER IT WANTS.

I get it. Schools with human mascots will go with big foam rubber caricatures rather than a dude in a costume, because the latter looks as though they might not be officially affiliated with the school/society at large. But look at that smile. That is the stuff of nightmares. The way it's frozen on Killian the Gael's face is terrifying. Hell with winning the play in round, I'll just be happy if that lets me keep my skin where it is.

Iona Gaels advance

#16 Lamar Cardinals vs. #16 Vermont Catamounts

Catamounts! Cat-a-mounts! Catam-ounts. I'd thought this was just another name for the noble Puma, but apparently it's just a name for any medium-sized cat that hangs around mountains waiting for wayward explorers with tasty innards. Literally, it's just "Cat of the mountain" that got slammed together into Catamount. That's sort of disappointing, though I'm not sure why and I'm sure it's not the fault of the good people of Vermont.

The Cardinals are, for some reason, a popular mascot pick, though I'm not entirely sold on why. They're seed-eaters, so it's not as though they're going to fly down and tear the throat out of a cat o' the mountains and they're bright and have that fun crown, but that seems like it'd just make it easier for them to be seen. Lamar Cardinals sounds like a baseball player from the 1940's, but that's not who's up for the battle here. It's a fairly standard looking cardinal, though I do have to give Lamar credit for really defining the hell out of the eyes.

The Lamar Cardinal needs to get a good night of sleep. This is ridiculous.

Still, seed-eating bird versus one of many cats of the mountains doesn't really seem like a contest, does it?

Vermont Catamounts advance.

#12 California Golden Bears vs. #12 South Florida Bulls

I've been very outspoken in the past as to how much bears are basically monsters who will feel nothing as they tear you to pieces. That stands here, though apparently the California Golden Bear went extinct in 1921 when some Californians shot the last one. So I'm not sure I'm cool with them suddenly claiming to be really cool with the bear, but I suppose throwing it on their flag has got to count for something. Florida's flag doesn't have a bull on it, that's for damn sure. They've tacked their state seal onto it, which is fine and all but not really my cup of tea.

And the South Florida Hibiscus Flowers don't sound very threatening.

And while bulls do have that whole goring thing going for them, there are people that voluntarily get into an arena with bulls to stab them with darts and swords and generally be a dick to them until they're dead. I don't believe that happens so often with bears (or at least, Hemingway didn't see fit to write about bear/human fighting). So while Generic Bulls still exist where California Golden Bears do not, I'm going to go ahead and award this one to Cal.

California Golden Bears advance

The Trip Home

So far, I've figured out that I'm not very good at planning for consequences. I didn't buy sunglasses. I wore flip-flops to hike up a volcanic island, then didn't think that if I got into the sea afterward that I'd not be able to walk out because the beach is made out of rocks and pain. I learned that I'm really aware of what gear the vehicle I'm driving is in if I'm parked at the edge of a cliff. And apparently sunscreen is good.

Oh, also, if something's made entirely out of limestone, it is terrifying to climb, because there's a non-zero chance that you'll slip off and die because your sneakers are not so big on traction.

But most importantly, it turns out that planning something a few weeks in advance, before you're travelling, might make you underestimate just how much travelling you've planned on cramming into two days.

We woke up at about 10 AM on Friday, our last day in Santorini. The plan was that we'd take a ferry back to Piraeus (the same non-speedboat that we'd taken to get to Santorini), then spend the night in Athens before getting on a plane on Satuday at 11am so that we'd be home at roughly 8pm, Chicago time. The thinking was that the speedboats are about double the cost of the non-speedboat and that we weren't booking that part of the trip far enough in advance to get a comparable deal for the flight from Santorini to Athens and hey!, Friday and Saturday are totally different days, so it should be fine to travel eight hours one day and fourteen the next, right?

Wrong. Just really, really incorrect.

After getting up, we met Jordan again for breakfast (the same buffet we'd had every time we went out for breakfast) and were eventually joined by Uncle Eddie, who wanted to check his email before heading off for a flight to Rome. At this point, I'm pretty much done with the buffet (which I'd never thought would be a phrase I would ever think), but it's only 5 Euro and it's next door, so what the hell. I left to go return the ATV, because they'd said I should do that before noon though, again, they didn't have a credit card number or any kind of collateral, so I'm not sure what they'd have done if I just drove it onto the boat and tried to get it back to Chicago, which would have been challenging but worth it. And would be even more worth it if Chicago had anything resembling terrain. I did have to put more gas in it (I gave the guy 5 and have no idea how much gas I bought beyond knowing that it brought me up above a quarter tank, which I believed would incur the wrath of the ATV guy.)

I dropped it off, they never looked at the gauge, and I left. So I probably could have gotten away with not putting gas in it at all, but then I'd have felt bad, and this was not a time to feel guilty about screwing the ATV guy out of a few euros.

When we rented it, he said he'd be able to give me a ride back to my hotel (which was located on the far end of the beach), but apparently that was just sweet, sweet marketing to get me to rent his underpowered 4-wheeler for a day, because that offer was no longer on the table. I walked back, for some reason wearing the watersocks that I'd bought.

This was not a week for reasonable footwear, apparently.

By the time I got back, Marina had settled the remainder of the hotel bill and it was time to frantically try to guess how much we could put in our suitcase without going over 50 pounds and get out to the sidewalk. We packed what we could into the backpacks and the little lunch bags that had been our welcome baskets and decided to ditch some stuff so that we'd be able to avoid paying for luggage (the snorkel set was cheap, Marina didn't think she'd ever use her aquasocks again and I left my Old Navy flip-flops out of spite and anger) We said goodbye to Jordan and stood on the corner waiting for the guy who had brought us from the port to take us back for another 15 Euro.

The ride back to the port was less "Holy Damn! We're on an island!" than the ride in, and was mostly just me attempting to get any kind of breeze from the window while thinking that I was probably never going to be back on this particular bit of the Earth. I don't know if I will; I didn't really expect to be able to go this time, so I guess it's possible I'll do this again.

Waiting for the boat was a little bit of hell, after some time having a crepe at a restaurant at the port which was filled with chocolate sauce for some goddamn reason (every other time we'd seen that, they meant Nutella and apparently just thought we wouldn't know what that was). I'd been out in the sun enough, and was very much looking forward to getting out of the heat and away from everyone and their enormous backpacks. Eventually, we boarded and I went pretty much straight away to the indoor airplane seats, which was reasonably empty because everyone else rushed to the decks. The ferry back seemed quicker (though it always seems that way when you're ending a trip; probably something to do with the fact that you're no longer anticipating the trip). I came out of the airplane seating to the deck once the sun was setting, which apparently signalled to everyone else that it was time to go back inside.

The Aegean at night is wonderfully dark. You can't see where the sky stops other than that there are no stars and an occasional lighted ferry boat on the water.

Which is, I think, healthy for me. I grew up in a relatively rural exurb and while I for the most part really enjoy living in Chicago, the constant light pollution makes me miss being a really young amateur astronomer in Western Pennsylvania. I miss the stars, and while they weren't terribly visible on the boat (because of the boat's own light), it was a lot better than trying to look at the sky on Berwyn. Some French teenagers were doing something incredibly loudly and Marina and I tried valiantly to have some of the wine we'd bought at the market next to our hotel in Santorini, more or less entirely because it was sold in a plastic 1.5L bottle and cost 2 euro. It was 2 euro because it was awful.

We stopped.

After disembarking, we got in the cab line (relatively close to the front) and rode back to our hotel, which was evidently in Omonia, which is evidently kind of seedy.

We were across from something that appeared to serve some kind of spicy food of indeterminate origin and were greeted by a really earnest man who appeared to know who we were (probably because we were the only ones not to check in yet.) We got a password for the internet on a little receipt that we were told was good for three hours and given a key to a room and pointed down a darkened hallway (which, ostensibly had motion detectors rigged up to lights which sort of worked).

Which was, incidentally, the smallest room I've ever been in. There was just enough room for a king-size bed so long as we were ok with having the suitcase either wedged between the bed and the door or in the hallway. The bathroom was a separate room (thank Zeus), but the toilet was, for some reason, in a little cubby hole behind the door. Luckily, our flight was at 11am, meaning we had to be up at 8, so we propped the luggage in front of the door (partly out of necessity because of the size of the room, and partly because it was the most "potentially housing a serial killer" hotel we'd been in), poured the godawful plastic bottle wine down the drain and slept.

In the morning, we woke, checked out, skipped breakfast and headed to Omonia Square to get on the metro. It didn't seem to be the worst place I've been (as everyone in Athens kept assuring me that it was) but I probably wouldn't want to have hung out there at night. Mostly, I was too exhausted to care. We bought our special airport metro tickets (which are more expensive and they keep signs up everywhere assuring you that you'll be fined if you don't have the ticket on you, but it seemed like no one ever checked tickets ever, so I don't know). After about an hour on the metro and some work to get through security (which was oddly immediately before our gate, rather than centralized, which was nice), we were on the plane to Philadelphia.

I have never been on a louder plane. Nothing mechanical; it was just apparently also housing roughly thirty Greeks who either knew each other or were incredibly friendly and walked up and down the aisles, talking and laughing and having a grand old time, which is great for them but hampered my ability to get any sort of sleep. We managed, made it to Philly where a sort of tired delirium set in, then (after a short layover, a bumpy flight and clearing customs) we made it back to the apartment.

We slept, because at this point it was 8pm, Chicago time, and so 4am Athens time.

I can't really think of a nifty way to tie everything up. I think everything's already been said in the other entries. We'd managed to get to Greece and back with only some minor (by which I mean rather serious) sunburn, slightly diminished bank accounts and a bunch of ticket stubs, which are currently in a shadowbox along with some pebbles from Kamari that we'd put into a test tube. Success.

Driving at Night

After spending the day roasting in the sun on top of a mountain, we decided that we should have one more night in Oia to look around more slowly and deliberately than we were able to when we were rushing to find a way back to the southwest of the island. We got ready and were prepared to take the bus from Kamari to Fira, then from Fira to Oia because there’s not a direct bus from anywhere to anywhere else without a connection in Fira.

It’s like Atlanta.

Before heading out, I drove the ATV around a bit more, figuring that we wouldn’t get a chance to use it again and that 15€ seemed like a lot to take it on one trip up the side of a cliff (and yet, a better deal than having to walk up the damn thing, which would have meant we wouldn’t have seen the top as we would have died). I plotted a course that mostly involved only ever turning right, because I’m still not comfortable with this sort of traffic free-for-all that the island has going, so never crossing a lane seemed easier.

It hadn’t occurred to me that this just meant I’d be making left turns all the way home, but then this wasn’t a week for thinking ahead. This was a week for realizing that I’d forgotten something vital, then being in pain for a long time.

I turned right at All Day Coffee Time (which sounds excessive) and eventually found my way to the fence that encloses the runway of the island’s airport. And a military installation, which freaked me out and prompted me to start heading back. Still, it was a nice pleasant ride with zero traffic (either because there’s not much traffic on the island in general or because no one uses their rented ATV to go drive around the back of the airport), and it wasn’t until I got back to Kamari that I started to get a headache from wearing a helmet twenty sizes too small for my head. I also passed the hotel pretty egregiously, but managed to find my way back.

Getting back to the hotel, Marina agreed that we hadn’t used the ATV enough, so maybe we should drive it over to the bus stop.

Which eventually turned into “to hell with the bus, let’s just drive to Fira, at which point we will decide whether we need to drive to Oia”.

It’s really scary, it turns out, driving around a vehicle you’ve learned how to use that morning through what amount to city streets (to the degree that Santorini had city streets.) Our plan was to make it up to Oia for the sunset, which means the sun was pretty low in the sky and, for long stretches of road, directly in my eyes.

I really should have bought sunglasses.

We managed to make it to Fira without getting too lost (mostly because there’s one main road, so not getting off the road will eventually get you to Fira), and I managed to remember enough of the local geography to find a parking spot not too far away from the main square.

We parked the ATV after deciding that it was probably too far to drive to Oia in time for the sunset (as I was topping out at about 50 km/h). I was very paranoid about the parking, but that’s probably because I wasn’t accounting for the difference between traffic enforcement on a little tourism-driven island in the middle of the Aegean and Chicago. So we started walking through alleys to get to the bus station. Oddly, we succeeded, which I’m pretty proud of. Sure, it’s not a particularly big town, but to go from “hopelessly lost at midnight” to “capable of knowing where we are while in alleyways” in the span of two days is pretty good, I think.

The bus to Oia confirmed two things: It’s probably better for my mild acrophobia that I slept through the cab ride on the night of the welcome dinner and that I had no business trying to take an ATV to Oia. You’re on the side of a hill the whole time and while there’s nominally a guard rail, it’s not actually going to stop you from plummeting to your death (particularly if you’re a bus). The driver was going much faster than I’d have gone, but then I’m guessing he’s done this thousands of times.

Or has no regard for human life. Either one.

We ran around in a sort of panic (as it was 7:20 pm, and we’d gathered that sunset started at roughly 7:30), looking for a restaurant that had a sunset view and only realizing then that it probably would have been a good idea to have gotten a reservation. We eventually found a place called Petros, which had a fish tank out front and a little sign that advertised a sunset view.

The latter part was sort of half true. They did have a sunset view from the rooftop seating area, but they’d bizarrely walled up the wall that actually looked directly out to sea, so that only about half of the restaurant actually benefited from the sunset view. Luckily, we were able to get a table that looked out toward the sunset, as long as you sort of leaned and didn’t mind the little Japanese kids running around the table in front of you. We ordered the standard fried cheese and teramasalata and then I’m pretty sure the waiter decided we had enough, because he didn’t come back to actually ask for our orders.

Eventually, we were allowed to order dinner beyond, you know, appetizers. Marina got some manner of Greek pasta,and I got grilled mussels, because I wasn’t aware you could grill mussels and wanted to see what that was all about. I was actually pretty impressed with Petros, as far as quality from a “fish tavern” from a place we ducked into to see the sunset. Plus, they used a dumbwaiter, which is just added awesome.

After dinner, we went back to the business of “walking around Oia without frantically searching for a bus”, which it turns out is a much better way to walk around Oia. There are a lot of little souvenir shops, most with little ceramic versions of the blue domed churches that dot the island, at least one of which has a corner full of very family unfriendly items behind a post-card stand, which leads one to question whether the market for adult toys really overlaps with the market for calendars with cats on them. Which there are a lot of. Cat calendars. They’re everywhere.

One's called "Rebel Street Cats (of Greece)". Which is a bit much, isn't it?

There are also a bunch of little art galleries and artisan shops, which are fun to walk through. No pictures were allowed, but there was a small art gallery which had a degree of incomprehensibility.

Inside, there was a bull, wearing an American flag-tie with glass innards on a glass box containing a few euros that had facts about the Stock Market Crash of 1929 written around the sides. I wasn’t expecting political/economic satire next to a bunch of fish restaurants and souvenir shops, but there it was. It was next to a mural of a motorcycle with the words “Captain America” on the side, which leads me to believe that Grecian artists on the island might not be the biggest Marvel comics fans in existence.

Away from the formal art galleries, there were a number of little shops apparently run by the people who made the crafts inside. Marina bought two small bowls from a woman who was much more excited to talk about the bags she’d made (she displayed one to a woman who was in the store, demonstrating that you could wear it as a front pouch. “Like a marsupial”, she explained.). Next door, there was a woman who had made hundreds of little marionettes which were all finely crafted and (though this wasn’t advertised) would awake in the night to drink the blood of the innocent.

About the time we’d gotten to the bowl store, I’d realized that I had been shortchanged at a market. I’d gotten wrapped up in getting on with seeing Oia and hadn’t noticed that I’d been given too little back after purchasing some small souvenirs. We darted back and tried to explain the situation, but to no avail. Still, just a few euros, so after Marina calmed me down, we went back to walking.

After a short stop in Atlantis Books (staffed by some people talking about the Canucks/Bruins series and which proudly declared via a sign in front that Lonely Planet thought they were pretty nice), we were on a bus trip back to Fira to pick up our ATV and get back to our hotel.

Again, I’m glad there wasn’t much traffic and that there was only one main road, so we were able to actually get back to Kamari without too much trouble. We met Jordan for ice cream, went to the bar to use the internet and shortly thereafter went back to get some sleep before the ferry ride to Athens.

Everybody's Gone

Everyone has left. Both families left obscenely early in the morning with the exception of Tim, who had a flight at 6pm or so and Eddie, who is staying until Friday, when he’ll take a flight to Rome to continue his vacation. Jordan checked out of the hotel we’d been staying in to move to a cheaper one down the street, so our hotel seems relatively empty.

Marina and I were determined to make it up to Ancient Thera, because it seems as though if there are really old things around you should probably see them. Ancient Thera was at the top of a mountain (Messavouno), probably out of some sort of strategic reason but more likely because the Hellenistic era residents liked making me climb up things. We’d previously stopped in to ask about the bus tour that visits the site, but evidently all they do is get you up the road safely and drop you at the gate for 10 € each, at which point you’re charged another 2 € to walk around the site without a guide. Which seemed a little much, especially as we’d entered the “attempting not to spend every penny we had in Europe” part of the trip.

Travis had mentioned that he’d rented an ATV for something like 16 € and had driven up the road to the gate (which was evidently built to accommodate Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Santorini), but that he’d stopped there and turned around to ride back down the mountain. That would be cheaper than Marina and I each paying for the bus and seemed more fun, so we decided on renting an ATV.

I probably should have mentioned to Marina that I hadn’t driven an ATV before. I may have, but if I did it was sometime in the mid 90’s and briefly around the hills of Western Pennsylvania, but I’m not sure if I’m imagining that. In any case, I’m not a regular ATV driver. ATVer. All Terrain Gentlemen.

We stopped in two shops before finding one that would rent us an ATV for 15 € and ran with that. They gave us helmets (which were apparently for infants or dolls or something, because mine just made me look ridiculous at the cost of being in any way able to keep me safe), showed me how to operate the thing and sent us on our way to get some gas.

I should note that they took down my driver’s license number and my hotel information, but they didn’t actually keep a credit card on hand or anything, nor did they demand any form of deposit. Just hand them 15 € cash and they’ll let you speed off down the road. I’ve got to presume they’ve got a way to make sure you don’t just keep it, but honestly, there didn’t seem to be a lot of controls.

Suddenly, I wished I had understood the traffic patterns of the island better.

I did a reasonable approximation of someone who knew what they were doing (which mostly consisted of speeding along and hoping no one would hit me) and managed to get to the gas station without dying, so we decided we were ready for the steepest, most windy cobblestone road that’s ever existed.

It was a ten-degree incline, roughly twenty or so hairpin turns and it was (generously) about 1.25 lanes. And, of course, it’s constantly climbing the roughly 1200 feet above sea level, so every turn is completely blind as you’re at least ten feet below the next bit of road until you’re actually turning. We only encountered one of the tour buses, and it was very much a “please don’t hit me because there’s nowhere for me to go” sort of situation. Marina seemed much more terrified by the whole thing than I was, which was probably due to two factors.

1. Difference in perspective.
As far as I was concerned, I was mostly just trying to get the thing up the mountain (the downside to renting the cheapest ATV we could find is that it was also the least powerful, though it got us where we were going well enough). If you stare at the road ahead of you and spend most of your time trying to figure out if a car is going to be barreling down the road at you, you don’t have much time to look over the side of the mountain, which I’m sure what scarier than I realized until I was at the top.

2. Having no idea if I could drive the thing.
It turns out, yes. I’m not sure if I’d have trusted me to not kill us both, though.

Once you’re at the top of the mountain, there’s a spot for you to haphazardly park your ATV, scooter or rental car and start the hike up to the actual archeological site. Well, actually, you start the hike up to the gate, which is up a very steep road (in, again, very hot weather), which is near the site only in a relative sense. There’s a very sizeable hike up from there (first up a set of stairs, then just up the road to the ancient site) until you’re actually able to walk around the ancient city, first passing a number of artifacts that are of varying ancienticity. There’s an early Christian church (which is one of the most recent additions to the site) then a kilometer long walk up toward the actual city center. Marina was too tired to carry the camera at this point, so I took a bunch of pictures of pretty much everything that had a sign in front of it, then a picture of the signs.

There’s not a lot that remains at the site, but it’s fascinating to walk through the streets and see the outlines of the foundations of houses and government buildings, some of which is around the age of the Parthenon, but some of which (the sanctuaries at the edge of the city) predate that by 300 years. We wound through the buildings to wind up at the gymnasium and garrison, where the Ptolemaic soldiers were housed and exercised. We walked past the Agora and the theater (which was set down the cliff side) and then realized that if we didn’t get water, we were going to collapse.

We wound back down through the streets toward the parking area, where an enterprising resident has a concessions stand. We bought water and started our decent on our ATV with our tiny helmets.

The drive down was somehow less terrifying, possibly because I was riding the brake the entire time to keep from speeding off the edge. After successfully figuring out which way the hotel was, we adjourned to the pool, another old thing having been conquered.

Coming up next: Getting to Fira and one more dinner in Oia.

Weddings in Clouds

Wedding Day

Today is the first day that we didn’t have travel or scheduled activities during the day. We were entirely free until 6:30, at which point we had a bus scheduled to pick us up and take us to Santo Wines for the ceremony. We actually slept until 10am, mostly because we’d learned to close the blinds so as not to have the sun blazing in. The plan was originally to take a tour bus up to Ancient Thira, and we walked to the end of the boardwalk with that intention.

It was hotter out than any day we’d had so far (or seemed that way anyway) and we were jetting off with very little water and no breakfast, so by the time we got to Kamari Tours, we’d decided to go back to our hotel rather than have Marina collapse and fall off of a mountain. Instead, we got some water, then picked a place to eat that didn’t serve gyros. We settled on King’s Restaurant by virtue of it being nearby when we decided that we desperately needed food.

A note about that lunch.

During our stay, the music in a lot of the restaurants has seemed off. Santorini is a very tourism driven island, and as a result, most everything is geared toward the tourist. It’s beautiful, but it’s not somewhere you’d go if you’re after authenticity. As a result, most restaurants play either instrumentals or American music, sometimes in a sort of confused mix of current music, stuff from the 70’s and a wide variety of genres. After we got off the bus on our first day in Santorini, for example, we walked home to the tune of “Part-Time Lover”. Which isn’t something I’d expected to hear.

It was about 11am, so we figured King’s Restaurant would be playing something mild and relaxing. We were wrong. For some reason, and only this time (as we’d passed the place before) they were playing the filthiest music I’ve ever heard in my life. Moans and inexplicable crying babies and one song that was roughly a minute and a half long and was comprised of the experience of being in a motel with walls that are too thin. It eventually got to recognizable songs and LL Cool J seemed gloriously tame by comparison. Which is something. Given that we were the only customers in the restaurant, it was a somewhat uncomfortable experience. There we are, trying to enjoy our crepes (I had a Florentine sort of thing, Jordan had chicken and Marina had nutella, which they had on the menu as nutella but refused to call anything other than chocolate) and everyone walking by is associating us with lots of moaning.

Moving on from that, we decided to postpone the visit to Ancient Thira until tomorrow and focus on actually going into the Aegean. Given that my feet were still a mess and that pebble beaches aren’t easy to walk on in general, we went and bought aquasocks and, on a whim, cheap snorkeling equipment. The sea was cold at first, but nice eventually and very calm and snorkeling is sort of terrifying if you’ve never done it before. You’re putting a lot of faith into a cheap bit of yellow plastic that you’ve bought for 13€. We didn’t invest in fins because who are we kidding, but the water was clear and fish were pretty much everywhere. After a few attempts (most of which involved going under the surface, gasping, losing faith in the idea that I was going to be able to breathe underwater and resurfacing), I got the hang of it and swam out far into the sea. I have no idea how far, except that Marina kept telling me to come back like a concerned mother. Which is fair enough.

Final note about swimming in Kamari: The airport of the island is located a little northwest of the beaches, so every once in a while a small plane will start flying directly at you and you’ll realize there’s nothing you can do to get out of its way and prepare for impact. It passes over and lands, of course, but it’s still sort of terrifying.

At 5:30, we started getting ready for the wedding and by 6:30, we were waiting for the bus to arrive to take us to Santo Wines. The bus told the hotel it was waiting to meet us, but wasn’t actually there. About a mile of back and forth by Myles later and we deduced that the bus was waiting one block over, and was huge. Myles’ family had rented a minivan and was planning on driving on their own as we were supposed to get a bus that seated eight, but instead we were given a bus that seated roughly fifty. Myles told the bus to go and ran off to get to the venue and the bus sort of didn’t. It waited, because evidently the bus driver didn’t trust him and was sure there were more people waiting to get on the bus. The people in the minivan were waiting on the bus to drive so that they could follow. After a few visits from Tim, it was decided that the entire party would just board the bus, as it was 7pm and the wedding was timed to start at 7:30 so that the sunset would be incorporated.

Panic.

Everyone got on and we made it to Santo Wines on time and managed to get into position on a balcony overlooking the caldera.

I’m not one to be sappy, but the ceremony was goddamn beautiful. A cloud had covered the sun from view prior to the start only to move away when Andrea started toward the balcony and the view throughout was amazing. That’s not to diminish all the other weddings I’ve been to in my life, but this would be hard to compete with. A pair of local musicians played (on violin and on some lute-sort-of-thing that I’m not entirely sure what it was) and the officiant conducted the ceremony in Greek and English. The vows were great and memorable. There was complimentary wine, which I’m always going to be a fan of. Overall, awesome.

We headed back to a restaurant around the corner from the hotel for the reception. There, more wine, toasts from pretty much everyone (including a toast by Marina on behalf of the three of us who aren’t related to anyone) and prawns big enough to mug you in a dark alley if you run across them at the wrong time of night. Then dancing and eventually candles and sparklers.

I managed to resist the urge to write my name in the air with the sparkler. This wasn’t about me.

Congratulations again to Andrea and Myles.

Why Don't You Listen?

Fresh from the Volcano and headed off to the hot springs, we retired to the lounge. Partly because it was shaded, and partly because my feet were in too much pain to walk further than the lounge. We rode (sailed? boated?) for about 20 minutes, then were told we were at the Hot Springs of Palea Kameni and that we’d have 30 minutes total to enjoy them before we had to get back to the port.

These tours should be longer.

We were informed before departing that we would not be landing at the hot springs, but that we’d have to get off the boat and swim. What they meant by this, evidently, was “you will jump off of the side of the boat into 10-meter-deep freezing water, then hopefully you’ll make it to the section of the sea that’s somewhat warmer”. I’ve never really been one to start jumping off of my mode of transport, but, frankly, everyone else was doing it.

We formed a line to get to the side of the boat that we’d be jumping off of and waited as most of the people on the boat leapt into the bay and started swimming. There were a few hiccups; an older man in a white speedo that seemed to be having a lot of trouble getting his family’s attention refusing to jump until he was acknowledged and a few people who decided that they’d jump off the top deck of the boat and were admonished by the tour guide in a way that was not so much stern as resigned and amusing.

First “Please do not jump off the top.”

Then: “Do not jump off the top, please. Why don’t you listen?”

Once we were in, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d been swimming somewhere that I couldn’t reach the bottom of in years, and that I was kind of bluffing when I told the tour guide that I was a strong swimmer. Evidently, I’m good enough to get from the jumpoff point to the springs and back.

The springs themselves weren’t so much hot as “not as ridiculously cold as the water we jumped into at first” and there was a sort of red mud that covered everything and apparently stuck in my beard. There was a small building, but no one was in it and I’m not sure what purpose it served. There were also cliffs rising up above the hot springs and, as we looked more closely, lots of goats, which was somewhat unexpected. They made noises and seemed not as pleased that we were there as we were. Almost as soon as we made it to the springs, we were told to come back to get on the boat and return to Fira.

Again, these tours need to be longer.

Once back aboard, we dried out on the top deck (as we’d forgotten towels) and made our way back to the old port. We were presented with the option to walk up the cliff we’d ridden down in the cable car or to take donkeys up the path or to take the cable car back up for another 4€. We chose the cable car. Eddie and Tim walked up, which I admire, but I’d done enough climbing things for the afternoon. Once at the top, we gathered the rest of the group and set off to find the bus station, which is harder than it was the previous night. Of course, the previous night we were just sort of driven to the station and we were now wandering the streets of a strange town trying to find what they called the city center. We eventually made our way to the bus, took it back to Kamari and went to the beach, exhausted. I tried to swim (and was pretty successful at that part), but was unable to get out of the water. The thing about a pebble beach is that pebbles aren’t nearly as soft as sand, and if you’ve climbed a volcano that afternoon in little more than straps of plastic, it’s excruciatingly painful. Eventually, though, I did make it out of the water (which is how I’m able to be writing this right now) and headed upstairs to get ready for the rehearsal dinner, which was back in Fira at a place called Naoussa.

Naoussa was great, and it was recommended to me to try their moussaka, which I did. It was significantly better than the stuff I’d had in Athens, with a sort of creamy potato topping. We also found (at last, as Marina had been talking about it since we left Chicago) teramasalata and salty fried cheese, which was salty and fried and therefore amazing. We shared some more of the local dry wines, took pictures of the donkeys going down the street and of the shop across the way that had a mannequin who apparently couldn’t keep her top up, then walked back through Fira in search of a taxi and gelato. We were also introduced to Carlos, Myles cousin and Best Man, a doctoral student in physics at Columbia. I talked a bit about the various things I’ve worked on in the past, then got derailed into a discussion about Green Lantern, Justice League and Locke and Key.

Which is how conversations normally go.

One taxi ride back to the hotel and a brief ridiculous fruity drink session later, and we’re going to pass out. Actually, while at the bar, the server asked us where we were from. We said “Chicago.” and he replied “Ah. Bulls.” Which is the same exchange we had upon checking in at Hotel Apollo in Athens, except that the inflection was different. Santorini Server said it as a way to acknowledge that he knew of Chicago. The Hotel Apollo guy said it sort of disappointedly, which I agreed with.

Tomorrow is the wedding.

Bad Decisions in Greece

We woke up at about 8am with the sun streaming in through the windows of our hotel room. You’d think that, given that this is a vacation, we’d be somewhat better about not doing too much and waking up when we felt like it, but then you wouldn’t have been accounting for how bright the sun is. We made our way over to a continental breakfast at a hotel that wasn’t ours (and thus charged us for the privelige of eating their ham). It’s a pretty good spread, and exactly the same as the one we had at our hotel in Athens. Some ham, some cheese, yogurt and honey, peaches, a choice of corn flakes or granola, orange juice, coffee and a boiled egg. We loaded up, knowing that we wouldn’t be eating for a while and we’d be doing something strenuous.

Andrea had arranged for us to go on a small boat tour, leaving from the old port in Fira, then heading to Nea Kameni to see the active volcano, followed by a swim in the hot springs at Palea Kameni.

Which sounds a lot tamer than it is.

We took a bus driven by some people that work at the hotel up the mountain to Fira. Well, more correctly, most of the rest of the party took the bus up to Fira from the hotel. Marina and I attempted to go to the ATM with 15 minutes before we had to be back to be picked up by the bus, but there are evidently only two ATMs in Kamari (that we ever found) and they’re not exactly right out in the open. By the time we figured out what street to turn down and which square to go to, we were cutting it close, and when you throw in a guy standing in front of the ATM apparently baffled as to how it works, it was hopeless. We gave up and ran back to the hotel to find Jordan outside, with an explanation that the bus had left but that a separate car would take us up to the top (it had always been the plan for the car to take three, and we’d just inadvertently decided that it would be us). The driver was a woman named Diane, the person Andrea had communicated with to set everything about the trip up, who was from Vancouver who’d gone on a Europe trip with a friend roughly thirty years ago and wound up getting a job in Greece.

So that’s fun.

We got to Fira and were dropped off at a steep alleyway with instructions to climb up the hill and follow the signs for the Cable Car. We did and, thankfully, found the rest of the party.

So, the thing about the Cable Car. When I hear the words “Cable Car”, I think of trolleys and the Brooklyn Dodgers and Star Trek IV. This was not the trolley kind of cable car. This was what I’d always thought of as an “incline”, what with the Duquesne and Monongahela Inclines being my only experience with little train that goes up and down the side of a hill. Rather than being a railcar system, it’s sort of an enclosed ski-lift, with gondolas hanging from a cable.

I was not prepared for the cable car.

It’s a smooth enough ride, though there are a few moments where the angle at which the cable is declining changes more drastically than I was expecting, and you do get a pretty good view of the old port.
We got to the bottom and ran to the end of the port and back a few times, looking for our boat, before discovering that it was the pirate ship looking thing that we’d run past when we first got to the port. Everyone boarded and we were off to the central islands.

Upon arriving at Nea Kameni, we were told that we could leave our belongings in the lounge. We got off, and were told that we shouldn’t leave money or cameras on board, but Marina and I somehow didn’t hear this and went up and paid for the privilege of walking up the volcano. There was evidently some confusion among the group and most everyone else stayed back to get our stuff off the boat and wait for the tour to return from the volcano. We later confirmed with the tour guide that they lock the lounge (which is why they directed us to leave our stuff there) and bring a second, smaller expedition back, and that the money-or-cameras thing was mostly given in a sort of “if you’re really paranoid” sense.

I’m glad we’d already paid and were walking up the hill by the time we heard all of this. Not because we were worried, but because I’d hate to have missed out on the volcano.

Tips If You’re Climbing To The Top Of A Volcanic Island

1. Do not wear flip-flops.

Because of the mixup with the ATM, we were unable to go back to our hotel room before getting in the car and jetting off to Fira, so I was still wearing the flip flops that I had on for breakfast as a result of being too lazy to put on real shoes. Which are fine, if you’re walking on a boardwalk or down to the beach, but climbing a hill made entirely of smallish igneous rocks is a bad idea. Most people had more sensible footwear than I (though there were some women in platform sandals) but this was not some leisurely walk up a smooth, slight incline. This was a hike. At noon. In 85°F heat. Being led by a woman who was running. Because she is a cyborg.

Marina charged up the volcano really well, mostly stopping to wait for me as I was doing it essentially barefoot, except with the added pleasure of having a little plastic thing dig into my foot and trying to tear my toe off by sheer force of friction. We eventually caught up to Uncle Eddie, then got overly enthusiastic when we reached the top of the first crater, apparently not understanding that there was a whole lot of Volcano left to climb.

2. Bring loads of water.

We brought some, but I’ll reiterate that it’s a pretty tough hike up a rocky volcano in the middle of the day in the sunniest place that’s ever existed. We took a lot of pictures (mostly of the scenery), but the ones of us mostly look defeated, tired, thirsty and sweaty. I’d say we could have done with more warning about how strenuous the climb would be, but then there’s no real fun in that, is there?

3. To hell with the tour guide. We’ll Wikipedia everything later.

Our boat only had a limited amount of time before it had to be back at the port. Our tour was due to end at 2pm, and another tour started shortly after that, so we were on a tight schedule. The tour guide seemed terrified that we wouldn’t get done in time, so she bolted up the volcano without actually waiting for most people to get off the boat. Our group (myself, Marina and Uncle Eddie) caught up to her at the end of her speech on the third crater, which erupted a few hundred years ago, to distinguish it from the one that exploded in the 17th century BC and created modern Santorini (and also may have destroyed Minoan settlements on the island). Evidently, we could have just hung one tour guide back, as the second guide (along with Andrea, Myles and Andrea’s dad Tim) showed up just as our guide decided to run back down the volcano.

Getting to the top was kind of thrilling in a way that I’m not entirely familiar with. There’s definitely a sense of accomplishment, even if they’re pretty well defined trails that thousands of other tourists have walked up. The view is spectacular, as you can see all of the island of Thira, as well as out into the Aegean Sea, and the communities (like Fira and Oia) dot the cliffs, all over the background of the hills of the volcano you’ve just climbed. Additionally, I’d just done the thing in flip flops, and the overall mood was “jubilant” briefly, then “We-have-to-get-back-to-the-boat-because-I’m-positive-that-woman-will-leave-without-us.” We rushed down the hill, Marina going much faster than I could in pieces of Old Navy foam rubber and made it back to the boat (and everyone else in the group). We boarded and were off to the Hot Springs.

As this post is running long, the hot springs and the rehearsal dinner in Fira will be recapped in the next post.

The Taxi Driver's Wife

We were invited to a welcome dinner for the people attended the wedding in Oia, which is on the other end of the island. I suppose this is as good a time as any to throw a map in to show where we’re going.



We’re staying in Kamari (A), which has black pebble beaches and dozens of scooters. Dinner was at the top of the crescent, facing the caldera. Santorini was once much more of a roughly circular island with a volcano on it, until the volcano erupted with roughly the force of Krakatoa and blew out the center of the island. There’s still an active volcano on the separate island at the center of the caldera (Nea Kameni), which we’ll be visiting tomorrow.

To get to Oia (C), we had to take a taxi, as we weren’t too familiar with the public transit yet. So, we placed an order for two taxis (which should hold eight people total) to drive from Kamari to Oia, which would be plenty of seats to get us up there as Myles and Andrea had rented a car and could drive. They left, then the taxis arrived, but the driver seemed confused that we wanted to go to Oia (it was evidently his impression that we were going to somewhere else in Kamari, which doesn’t make much sense.) He then told us that we could only fit three in the first taxi, which means we’d need to call another taxi so that everyone could fit, while waving his hands and talking about another passenger we needed to pick up. We all thought that there must be someone else coming in from the port, so we went with it.

About ten minutes into the drive, he pulls off the road and picks up our other passenger (or, two, actually), his wife and kid. Adorable, I guess, and I’m guessing either he had some engagement that wouldn’t allow him the time to drive all the way to Oia and back or he just didn’t feel like going the whole way back alone, but in any case, we were now carrying another passenger (who, now that I think of it, could have probably chipped in for the ride.)

I’d finally stopped being able to feign wakefulness on the ride and fell asleep for most of it, waking up when it was time to get to the restaurant.

Oia is amazing. It’s mostly built on the edge of the mountain and has narrow winding streets that go past dozens of souvenir shops, art galleries and restaurants, most of them advertising the view. Our dinner was at Nectar & Ambrosia, which had promised a sunset view that it was evidently unable to deliver on. Which is a shame, but the view it did provide was the best I’ve ever seen while eating dinner. It looked out over the caldera, from which you could see the other four islands that make up Santorini and which only got better the more the sun set.

Jordan had also stopped being able to stave off jet-lag, took the seat at the head of the table that no one else seemed to want to take (possibly because for some reason it was more of a throne than a chair) and promptly fell asleep on the armrest.
I had a “Mediterranean Quiche”, which I found to be a quiche, and Marina had the mushroom risotto, which I’ve never been able to successfully prepare on my own. We had some dry white wine because all of the local wines are dry, which I’d imagine comes from being the only area in Europe that’s officially a desert in the “very little precipitation for much of the year” sense. Overall, dinner was great. Everyone ran out of their seats to watch the sunset, which is again certainly different than anywhere I’ve had dinner in Chicago. That’s probably a function of the sunset over the Aegean Sea being somewhat more interesting than the sunset over Des Plaines.

After dinner, most of the wedding party went back to the hotel, with the exception of myself, Marina, Jordan and Andrea’s brother Travis. We walked down the streets of Oia, stopping to take pictures of things that apparently don’t turn out when you take a picture of them, so you’ll have to trust me on their awesomeness. The cliff is dotted with lighted pools and little white hotels offering great views if you’re ok with your hotel being in the side of a mountain, and I can’t say whether there’s anyone that’s actually there that simply lives in the village. During the walk, we lost track of where we were and weren’t sure where to find the bus stop. There are several stops along the road, but it seems as though if you’re in a town and would like to ride to another town, you’ve got to catch the bus on the main square. We ducked down a little street near an alleyway and looked sufficiently confused enough for a person smoking on the stairs to ask us where we needed to go. We told her we were looking for a way back to Kamari, at which point she jumped up and ran down a bus, waving her arms, so that we could get on. We bought tickets on the bus, and the ticket-guy explained that we’d need to get off this bus in Fira (the largest town in Santorini, marked B) and transfer to a Fira-Kamari bus.

I have mixed feelings about sleeping on the way to Oia. On one hand, even in the dark on the ride back I could see that we were on narrow winding mountain roads, overlooking cliffs (which had little guard rails which would have done absolutely nothing to the bus) and from which you could see all the little towns on the coast. On the other, I would have been terrified if I knew what was going on.

We made it to Fira, made a sharper turn than I’ve ever seen a bus make, and found our way back to Kamari, proud of the fact that we managed to get from one end of the island to another on our own for 3.20€. The rest of the party was by the pool, where Andrea and Myles were throwing a welcome party (Champagne! Rum! Greek beer!) and we hung out for a while before realizing that we were going to pass out on the tile around the pool.

So we went to bed.

No Stop Signs

I’ve lived in Chicago for nearly 6 years. At times, the overwhelming flatness of the place gets to me. It was nice when I was riding a bicycle everywhere, but it’s also just flat. No texture. That’s one of the things I miss most about Western Pennsylvania. Yeah, it’s hard to bike there, but at least there’s something other than unrelenting flatness.

I was not prepared for Santorini. We landed at the Port and waited in the garage with a bunch of scooters and trucks that had come with us, waiting to get off. The door lowered, the music played, and we were out and desperately looking for a guy holding a sign that had the name “White” on it. We found him eventually, a short, balding man holding a white piece of paper onto which “White” had been drawn in orange marker. He helped us into his van and started driving up the mountain, away from the port and towards Kamari, a resort town on the western coast where we’ll be living for the next few days. Before leaving, we picked up Myles’ Uncle Edward, who for the remainder of the trip will be referred to by everyone, related or not, as Uncle Eddie. The man can talk. I’ve never met someone so good at conversation. He’s got that ability (which I wish I had) to make the conversation about whoever he’s talking to.

I like Uncle Eddie.

The thing about Santorini (originally Thira, until the Venetians took it over after it had blown up a few times) is that it’s a volcanic island and has a lot more cliffs than I’m used to seeing. The ride from the port to our hotel in Kamari starts by climbing the mountain that’s next to the port via a steep road that has a number of 180° turns, because that’s how you make a road go down the side of a mountain.

The whole area is beautiful. A mix of low valleys with villages, large mostly barren peaks with nothing on them and a panoramic view of the Aegean. It has apparently no concept of stop signs, as the driver seems to just be flying through the island’s roads, slowing up a little when someone turns onto a street in front of him, but otherwise just driving as though there aren’t any other drivers. Which there aren’t, really. Santorini’s a tiny island with one main road and a bunch of little streets.

Our hotel is in Kamari (Καμαρι!) which is a little beach town that appears to be almost entirely tourism driven. We’re staying in some nice studios that connect to a pool and, as the owner of the hotel explains to us, there are some markets and restaurants in the area that we’re welcome to take advantage of, especially for buying water. I’m entirely used to a society where water and electricity are omnipresent. Electricity’s still around (though we do have a nifty little slot to put our key fob into in the room to make sure the electricity’s shut off if we’re not there), but the water, he tells us, is not so much drinkable. It’s good for showering, and should be fine for brushing our teeth, but he warns that drinking too much of it will make you “bubbly”, so we should buy bottled water (which is really cheap). Evidently, water was much more scarce at one time, but they’ve since added a desalinization plant, but not a purification plant. So we get some water, unpack our stuff and get ready for the welcome dinner, which will be in Oia (which is pronounced Iä, which means I don’t know how the Greek alphabet works).

More on Oia later.

I'm On A Boat In The Middle of the Aegean Sea

It’s almost too much to process.

We decided against taking a short plane ride (apparently about an hour) from Athens to Santorini, opting instead for an eight (or, apparently ten, if the guy who hops on the announcements every so often is who you go to for this sort of information). We pass islands pretty regularly, and we’ve made one of our two stops on the way to Santorini, at Paros, which the travel guide we bought (which has all of two pages on Santorini) describes as being easy to explore and having a “trendy fishing village”. I’m not sure what that phrase means. Anytime you say to me that I’m about to enter a “trendy fishing village”, I’m going to stare at you like you’re insane.

We got up to the top deck, which was cold as we set off at 7:30am, but has gotten warmer. We picked a largish table with benches, which people kept walking up to, contemplating and passing until a French couple decided to stop screwing around and sit down. Which is good. I’ve been alternately reading a book (American Gods, which I should have read by now) and attempting to sleep in a variety of ineffective but no doubt hilarious poses. It’s actually a pretty lightly packed boat, so there are a bunch of seats inside in what appears to be the interior of an airplane, but on a boat, which has wall chargers. So I’m writing here.

I had been warned before we left that it’d be hard to actually get to the boat once we were at the port, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all, really. Getting to the port, however, was entirely different. I thought that it’d be easy. We just take the Red Line from Metaxourghio to Addison Omonia, then transfer to the Green Line which would take us all the way to Piraeus. This didn’t happen. We took the Red Line to Omonia, then hauled our 50-lb suitcase up two sets of stairs to get back to just under street level, where we were informed by a bunch of construction equipment and tape that the Green Line connection was closed. There was probably some warning of this, but it was evidently in Greek, or I was inattentive. There are signs in English everywhere (as well as the metro announcements taking place both in Greek and English), but apparently, I missed it. So we went back down to where we came from and boarded the train back towards Aghios Dimitrios to get to Syntagma, where we could transfer to the blue line, which we would take to Monastiraki, where there was a working Green Line connection according to the guy in the booth at Omonia.

This all miraculously worked, but there was a lot of running and sweating. The Green Line train at Monastiraki hung out at the station for about five minutes (which added to the Panicked Ryan expression I’d had for the past half hour of being on every train that exists), but we were eventually on our way to Piraeus. We went into a ticket office, but not the one that had the tickets we’d purchased, so we ran out to pick up everything near the boat. Happily, there were a bunch of vendors selling bread and donuts so, bread in hand, we boarded.

We’ve got a stop coming up at Naxos (which the guide tells me is the largest of the Cyclades, and which The DK Eyewitness Travel Guide felt was worth two and a half pages) and from there on to Santorini. We’ve already seen some of the white, blue-domed churces on Paros, and Jordan recorded some of the ridiculous disembarkation music that plays when the loading hatch is being opened.

Now, to try for sleep and hope we eventually find Santorini.

Riot Gear and Souvlaki

To recap: the plan was to wake up relatively early, head up to the Acropolis and walk around until roughly 2:30, then head back to the hotel where, hopefully, Jordan would be waiting. We didn’t have any way to contact her as we don’t have cell phones that work, and we knew that Jordan wasn’t traveling with any sort of computer. So we left a note, explaining our plans, with the hotel clerk.

Also to recap: We woke up at 6:30 am, and it turns out that wandering around and trying to stay hydrated will make you sleep. Luckily, when we woke up, Jordan had arrived and managed to find our hotel, and rented a room. We headed out back to Plaka because we were comfortable with it and it’s touristy and we needed food, because we’d gotten into the habit of not eating ever, which is different from how things normally go.

The problem with looking for food while you’re hungry is that you’ll invariably try to stop at the first place that looks even somewhat reasonable. We picked a restaurant that had Coca-Cola seat covers, because we thought somehow that meant that it wouldn’t be terribly expensive.

Maybe Coca-Cola is subsidizing souvlaki restaurants for the aid of tourists.

It turns out that no, that’s not an indication of the amount of money you’ll be spending. Entrees were somewhere in the neighborhood of 18€ . That’s no good. So we awkwardly got up, handed the menus back to the guy who’d seemed so excited about a few new clients and walked across the square, where we found a more reasonable souvlaki place (Ithaki!). As far as somewhat-reasonable-but-still-more-expensive-than-street-food, it sufficed. We all ordered the beef-and-lamb gyros plate, which it turns out is a lot of food and, in our rush to get something we knew was somewhat Greek, we didn’t actually get to try anything other than that. Which is a shame. Mustard instead of tzatiki, though, which was new.

Across the street, we noticed a policeman. Then several more. Then they got riot shields and masks. With the oblivious nature of tourists, we assumed that everything was fine, finished our meal, and walked away from the restaurant to explore the rest of Plaka. In search of a gelato shop, we found our way through the winding streets to Monastiraki, and an apparently closed flea market, which I’m fine with. The square was lined with little souvenir shops, and seats on the wall were apparently at a premium, though when we found some, they were overlooking another glass-covered part of archeological Athens.

It’s a whole level of old that I’m not sure what to do with.

We wound our way back thorugh towards the Akropoli metro station until we heard a bunch of shouting, which we found out later was some manner of demonstration. We’d seen some anarchist graffiti near our hotel, but weren’t really prepared for whatever required the riot shields, so we walked rather quickly back to the metro and sped off towards our hotel.

Back at Hotel Apollo, we decided to check out the roof garden we’d heard so much about, by which I mean the hotel staff recommended it to everyone and, when I asked where I could buy groceries, was told that if I was hungry, I should probably just buy food from them.

To be fair, it was pretty awesome. 7€ for a bottle of wine and a rooftop view over all of Athens, including a clear line of sight to the lighted Acropolis. It’s kind of odd, actually, being in a city with no real skyscraper-esque buildings. Everything’s sort of 4-to-6 stories and made out of concrete. Still, that just means you have an uninterupted view as far as the city goes until you run into a mountain.

We collapsed shortly thereafter as we had to be up at 5:30am to get to the port to get on a boat to get to Santorini.