Santorini was such a last-minute shoo-in, I ended up grabbing the last flight of the evening back to Athens, just half a day before an early morning flight back to the US via Germany. Not the best of planning, as rather than run through the stress, logistics, and cost of getting to a hotel, sleeping for 4 hours, then getting back to the airport, I ended up just staying overnight at the airport. Luckily, Athens International is fairly used to such things:

There were just bodies EVERYWHERE.

Other than the obvious suckiness of doing an all-nighter though, I also made a new friend - a Chinese girl who randomly started talking to me in Chinese while I was waiting in baggage claim (I have no idea how she could tell I knew Mandarin) and it turned out she was doing the same thing I was, except traveling in the opposite direction; she was to head to Santorini in the morning. So we watched each other's bags and kept each other company for as long as she could stay awake, and I felt pretty proud of the fact that I not only managed to carry on a 3 hour conversation in Chinese but did so while exhausted.

On the flight, the great thing was that I could watch three movies at once and even keep track of our flight progress at the same time. 

The worst thing was that I could watch three movies at once and even keep track of our flight progress at the same time. I've never had ADD so bad before.

(And it was really weird to no longer be worried/thinking about where I'm going to stay tomorrow or how I'm going to get there.)

Lol so glad I have Global Entry. Seriously, it was worth jumping through all the hoops to get it. Look at how many people were still stuck upstairs in customs and not retrieving their bags. (Some airport guy had to come and re-distribute all the bags so that they wouldn't logjam.)

And holy cow, I slept 11.5 hours straight the night I got home. But I suppose that's what happens when you get up to watch the dawn, catch an hour's nap after, then do a full day's hard scramble around an island and volcano, then catch a a flight, pull an all nighter at the airport, catch another 2.5 hour flight, wait through the 4 hour layover (cuz you don't dare nap after you nearly missed your second flight by nodding off for 30 mins unexpectedly), and then mostly only cat-nap through the next 12 hour flight and then valiantly try to stay up for another 7 hours in order to adjust to PST in one night.

It's weird not to hear church bells chiming anymore.

Los Angelex, CA

I distinctly remember sitting on my bedroom floor when I was in 3rd or 4th grade cutting pictures out of a magazine. One of them was a waterfall that I would end up living just 20 minutes from in Washington (the famous Oneonta Falls in the Columbia River Gorge), while the other was of the white washed buildings and deep Marine blue roofs of Santorini. For the longest time, that was the only image of Greece to me.

Over two decades later, I'm actually here! 

(This particular panoramic was fun because the plane was coming in on approach, and by that time we were close enough to the coast that the plane's own forward motion created the panoramic shot itself - I just had to hold the camera steady while we flew by. FYI, found out the hard way the panoramic feature in the Samsung's native phone app doesn't use accelerometers to detect which direction the panoramic should build in - it detects edges in the image, so if all you have is wide blue ocean against wide blue sky, it'll never get started.)

Sadly, I only have just a little over 24 hours on the island, but I'm making the most of them. Renting a car was a three minute consideration - all reports on the net was that driving on the island could be a hair-raising ordeal. Luckily, between past experiences driving in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Road to Hana on Maui, it was no big deal after all and I'm all too glad I took the plunge.

(Renting was a bewildering combination of ease and unease - the Villas manager referred me to a "friend" who owns a car rental agency. The friend points out the car I can take and we go through the motions of filling out a one-page form for it. He notes that the gas tank is almost empty, there's a station I can fill up at a few klicks down the road - with the presumption that it would make it that far - and says I can bring it back just as empty. He gives me his cell phone number and says to just give him a call when I was ready to bring the car back so that he could meet me to take the keys. I suppose, though, that when you're on an island that only takes 1-2 hours to drive across, that there's really not a whole lotta places for you to take the car off to.)

Aaaaaaaaa Oia, Santorini! *flails* A picture of the very first blue dome I saw - it literally just popped into view right in front of me - and then all of the town itself. I almost drove right past the town - if it wasn't for the fact that I had unwittingly turned through a dead end parking lot I would've completely missed it. Instead I accidentally grabbed the ideal parking spot and now also parked my butt on the best spot on the island for the sunset. 

I actually ended up not exploring the town at all except for the short segment that I had to walk from the parking lot to my sightseeing spot. I had read about how you had to claim a space there early in the day, but had totally forgotten about it and simply chanced across it when looking for good photography spots (much like Oia itself). But it was already obvious from the steady stream of people that it would be full quite soon, so rather than give it up, I simply stayed well into the evening, after the last of the photographic opportunities had been exhausted.

When I left for Greece, I literally only had two things related to it in hand - a one way ticket from Germany to Thessaloniki, a one way ticket from Athens to the US, and about 8 days between them. Oh, and also a short list of places that a Croatian/English friend had flung at me on Facebook, but which was just so much alphabet soup to me for the time being as I had had no time to look up anything, as work literally swamped me up until midnight before I left Germany, even though I had supposedly buffered my Greece trip with 2 extra days between the end of the convention wrap-up and when I was supposed to vacation.

So, the hour wait at the airport becomes a mad research of places to stay in Thessaloniki. At Thessaloniki, I guess I look sufficiently lost to the bus ticket seller that he takes pity on me, waves off the people waiting behind me, and writes a detailed list of what routes I need to take to get to the hotel I had just booked that morning. The 1 hour, 2-bus trip to downtown is occupied by a rush research of the sites my friend had suggested and I arrive at the hotel with the determination that I would remain only a night and then move on the next day to Meteora.

After I drop off my bags I walk to the train station to buy a ticket, and HELLO TO QUEUING AS A CLOSE-CONTACT SPORT - two people simply walk up to the ticket window ahead of me before I realize that the line drawn on the ground is merely a western artifact of the station's construction and is in no way an indication of where the queue actually starts. As soon as I leave only 2 inches of space between myself and the back of the person currently at the ticket window, people understand I am next, I don't have to make angry faces at anyone, and yay it becomes a win-win situation overall.

Then I try to buy a ticket. And I am told I can't. Because the trains are going on strike tomorrow and so there are no tickets being sold. 

I gape at the lady behind the glass while the people waiting behind me shuffle impatiently, and ask when the last train leaves for the day.

"45 minutes."

I've seen enough of Thessaloniki on my bus ride into downtown that I think I would vastly prefer to be out in the countryside (especially after literally 2.5 weeks of being stuffed into hotel rooms, conference rooms, with people and meetings and lights). So after 10 minutes of hand-wringing and emergency searching of B&Bs near Meteora, I make a mad dash back to the hotel, pay a cancellation fee, grab up my bags (so glad I hadn't unpacked yet and oh god it still haunts me I accidentally stole the room key when I stuffed it into my back pocket to free up my hands for my bags and forgot to return it) and beat it back to the train station in time to catch the last train. (I don't even have the satisfaction of getting reimbursed for the cancellations by my trip insurance, since my journey has to be interrupted for 24 hours and heck if I want to wait that long on an 8 day vacation.)

Of course, as the train starts chugging out of the city, that's when I realize my utter insanity as 1) there is not enough bandwidth in middle-Greece to do more than map the fact that I am currently inside the country and 2) my phone is down to 9% battery and I still need it once I reach Meteora - hours later - in order to call a place to stay. I have no paper maps on me, and I can't even read my train ticket without breaking into a cold sweat over Physics-related PTSD.