Filling in some gaps

 I don't know whether to apologize for jumping back and forth like this or to just revel in it. I've got a couple of days to account for that I haven't mentioned at all so far, and if I get through them I can at least be somewhat up to the moment, or at least to the same island where we are right now. So I'll try to be brief.

Our last full day in Santorini was just improvised. It was Easter Sunday, so attractions like museums were closed, not that we really felt like doing that anyway. And we had a lunch reservation, which was silly as a concept because there were like 6 other people at the restaurant, for a traditional Easter lunch, which is roasted lamb, most traditionally done on a spit (believe it or not, I participated in that kind of lamb roast once a long time ago, although my only part in it was to pick up the lamb, a whole lamb mind you, at a butcher shop, toss it in the back of a station wagon- kind of an old school crossover vehicle for you young 'uns) and bring it to the house where this was taking place. In any event. we went to a part of Santorini that we hadn't explored. Santorini is essentially the rim of a sunken volcano, so it's an incomplete circle. 

We hadn't been on the southwestern part of it, so we drove pretty much all the way to the tip, or to the lighthouse at least. Some beautiful views there.

We took a, let's just say less than optimally maintained, road down to a very strange-looking, mostly deserted black sand beach, looked around there for a while, then went and had our very tasty roast lamb lunch, then followed along the coast east and eventually north until we found another beach that we'd wanted to explore. We strolled around, Ronnie took some cool photos, I mostly sat in the shade and experienced some biting insects.

Back at the hotel, everything was closed except a mini market, so we had cheese and cold cuts and crackers for dinner. It was pretty bad but we managed. The next day we puttered around and then left for Crete.

We left Crete on Thursday morning. We reversed course and rolled our bags over to the ferry at 7:45 and had a very mellow entrance to the boat because it was the point of origination. The ferry stopped back in Santorini and then at Naxos, before coming to our destination, Mykonos. It was about 4 hours but not terrible. We have one more ferry ride remaining. 

We'd experience boarding at an intermediate point on the route, which was crazy, but from the vantage point of disembarking (debarking? I don't know or really care), you have a couple of hundred people rolling down one side of the ramp while cars roll down the other, and then there people are rolling up where the cars went down and once every has gotten off, cars rolling on that ramp. This all happened in maybe 5 minutes and then the boat lifted the ramp and headed out.

We took a taxi to the airport to pick up the rental car, which was simpler than the process in Crete, where the office and parking were several blocks from each other, which was confusing when I tried to pick up the car, only to find the office closed because the agent had gone to the parking area, so I headed over there only to find she had gone back to the office. It worked a little more smoothly on returning it. Anyway, on Mykonos, we went to the Hertz office, which was huge and completely empty aside from us and the agent, who was extremely talkative and had lots of recommendations. We were happy to get an identical car to what we had in Crete, a nice little Toyota hybrid. We made our way to the hotel and I'll pick up from there on the next post.