We Did It!

Soundtrack for this post: Kid Astray, “Roads”

We’ve well and truly done it now kids! Saturday, 8 July 2017 will go down as our happiest and most special day (thus far). We were so glad to share our wedding ceremony with so many of our friends and family and I think this consensus view is that our reception was a pretty excellent party, thanks to the beautiful setting, great weather, good food, awesome band and of course all the party people.

We are so grateful to everyone who helped make it such a special day, especially our parents. A special thanks goes to Grace’s parents who, at a time when they should have been putting their feet up and relaxing after the wedding were helping us disgorge the contents of our apartment across their living room and dining room. We would not have been able to make our great escape on Wednesday morning had it not been for them allowing us to basically dump our stuff and ditch.

Ditch- that’s basically what we’ve done. We have only what can fit in 94 total liters across two backpacks, and the rest will have to wait. But, if you have to start a backpacking trip, you can do worse than a business-class flight to a cliffside house with a cave jacuzzi on an incredible volcanic island in the Mediterranean.

Bright and early on the morning of Wednesday, 12 July, we arrived at Heathrow Terminal 5. Jim, Grace’s dad, had already purchased us an upgrade to business class on our flight to Santorini, we then witnessed him sweet talk various BA staff first into letting us check in at the First Class Desk, and then into using the First Class lounge, a den of aeronautical opulence the likes of which neither of us had ever witnessed. Suffice to say that such an auspicious beginning to our journey was both blessing and curse- though the most relaxing, pleasant way to wait for a plane, it represented a high point of luxury we are unlikely to summit again any time soon.  Well-plied with champagne and eggs benedict, we rolled towards the boarding gate.

The flight was quickly away and we were well treated by the staff up front, particularly by Andrew, an attendant whose travels had seemingly taken him on duty to virtually every place we would soon be visiting. His recommendations bespoke someone who had spent short periods of time in various cities all over the world- he recommended what was interesting in most city centres across the Caucasus and Central Asia, but had not had time to explore outside the areas nearest the international airport. It offered an interesting contrast to the type of travel we are hoping to pursue.

We landed at Santorini’s small airport and collected our rental car, a tiny VW Up! (I am not excited about the Up!, or at least not to that degree. The exclamation point is in its full name. It seems unfair to those of us of a more sober mindset that we must feign excitement for a German microcar in order to maintain nominal accuracy.) The man behind the rental car counter espoused some interesting views. He was a supporter of Brexit (which, perhaps given Greece’s recent experiences with the EU at its most overbearing and economically violent, is not so surprising) and claimed that Chinese tourists pretend that they speak worse English than they do. We allowed his commentary to pass largely unchallenged; he seemed uninterested in our views and was otherwise pleasant. We then set out in the Up! for our home for the next several days, a hillside apartment in the hilltop village of Pyrgos.

The rest of our adventures in Santorini will have to wait, but we will leave you with the view from our little house on the hill here: