Santorini Day 5 - Museums, wine tasting, our last day in Greece

Saturday, our last day in Greece, we decided to visit the museums that we'd missed due to their crazy hours and strikes.  We started out with another excellent self-catered breakfast out on the terrace.  Then we headed down the familiar foot path to Fira.  It was another nice day, so we took it leisurely, and stopped to take in the views and take a lot of photos along the way.

The first museum we went to is the fairly lackluster old Archaeological Museum.  I'm not even sure this one is worth going to...  It's just a single hall with mostly pre-historic ceramics, nothing much to look at, and poor presentation at that.  As one of the guidebooks said, it really is no match for the newer state of the art Museum of Prehistoric Thera, where we headed next.  The Museum of Prehistoric Thera is really awesome by comparison. Here, the layout here is well done, and the descriptions and explanations are well written and compelling.  Just about anyone can find themselves engrossed in the story told by the exhibits.  There are a number of the ancient wall paintings here, lots of household items, and a gold ibex figurine.

After the museum, we headed to Nikolas Tavern were we had another excellent Greek salad and some fried cod for lunch.  After lunch, we headed to the bus depot again to catch a bus to Santo Wines, a sort of consortium of wine growers on the island.  The facility at Santo wines is really something, they have a huge terrace built up with amazing views of both the caldera and Fira.  We ordered a sampler platter with cheese and breads.  Though the cheese cubes were good, we didn't quite understand the toasts. They were were rock hard, break your teeth hard.  There were six wines to sample and our favorite was the Vinsanto, a dessert wine, for which Santorini is famous (it is made with sun dried grapes/raisins).

We took the bus back to Fira and then set out on a quest to pick up a few more souvenirs before dinner.  We got to do one more walk through of the streets of Fira and stopped for a crepe as well.  There are not too many dessert type places, but we were able to find a few. The place we got the crepe didn't have lemon, so we got chocolate instead.

We bounced around through various souvenir shops, looking for a couple of items that we'd been eying since we'd been in Santorini but just hadn't picked up yet.  One thing we found was a lovely silk pillow cover, which we'd put off buying until we found the lowest price.  Many if not most of the souvenir shops share a good chunk of their inventory, but not necessarily their prices.  So if you shop around, you can often find the same item for cheaper at another shop.  Other items are a little more one of kind.  We decided to buy some sponges (real sponges) for my nieces and nephew, since we'd seen them play with the synthetic kind back home.  Kids toys are hard to come by where most stuff sold is jewelry.  We got the sponges from a guy who had a bunch of baskets of sponges out on a terrace that we'd seen many times.  He tried to sell us on some "top quality" sponges that would "last forever."  Once we noticed the bargain bin of cheaper, smaller sponges, we knew what we wanted, and I tried to explain to him that the intended recipients, kids, wouldn't know or care the difference.

We thought it fitting to have dinner at the place nearby our hotel that served us our first Santorini dinner.  But Aktaion doesn't open until 7pm, after the sunset, so we got to watch another brilliant sunset, this time from Firostephani.  Lots of other people showed up to take pictures as well and we helped several people take family photos and the like.  Just as the sunset was finishing, we took a table outside at Aktaion, which proved to be a bit chilly once the wind picked up.  We ordered their Santorini salad, pasta, and a piece of lemon cake for dessert.

We headed back to the hotel to rest up for our early 6:55am flight the next day.  24 hours (from 6:55am) of flights and layovers back home to Salt Lake!

Thanks everyone for following our blog for our honeymoon! We will have one last post of favorite pictures and then on to more adventure!