Well…. Santorini didn’t work out so well. We have now learned 2 things:
- Santorini is extremely overrun with tourists, most coming from cruise ships that park and given them an hour or 2 to rush through the very small town that has very, very narrow streets (like 2 people wide) where they constantly stop at the narrowest points to take photos. There seem to be 3-5 cruise ships a day and the crowd is constant from ~9am – 9pm.
2. More unexpectedly… we learned that the Sahara dessert which stretches across most of northern Africa can have huge sandstorms that can blow sand and dust far to the north and have a huge impact on the air quality across all of Greece. Unfortunately this happened and the AQI was 100+ and you could barely see the islands across the bay. You definitely couldn’t see the famous sunset – couldn’t even see the sun!
It was a huge bummer, and it seems the air quality forecast will remain bad for the next week across the whole region, so we immediately realized we needed to get out of there ASAP. There is a small airport with very limited flights. We could choose London, Paris, Hamburg, Athens or Milan. Italy has always served us well, and we happened to notice that Milan was currently ranked #1 in the world for cleanest air, so we headed there.
Note: This was our first experience on RyanAir. It has a pretty bad reputation as a super low cost carrier and a terrible experience. We paid $340 total for 4 of us including 4 checked bags and good seats, purchased less than 24 hours in advance for a 3 hour flight. That’s cheaper than many of the trains we have taken. And, I’ll say that the experience was actually quite good – super efficient, on time, not any less comfortable than other flights I’ve been on. Pretty intriguing.
So… now we are in Milan in a pretty great apartment for 3 nights and will figure out what there is to do here and where to go next. Only catch is that it’s pretty rainy for the next few days, but we’ll take that over breathing a sandstorm any day. It’s a bummer to cut our time in Greece short and end on a low note, but overall we all loved Greece and will definitely be back.
The journey so far…
