I didn’t think Santorini could be more beautiful than Mykonos but it definitely was.
When my group of girlfriends told other young people we were going to Santorini, they said it was not going to be fun for us. It is definitely honeymoon land. Compared to Mykonos which was filled with young partiers, Santorini was crawling with couples and the AARP crowd.
But that didn’t stop us from having a good time!
Our group of four stayed in a four bed room at budget hotel Petra Nera in Perissa which is fairly far away from everything in Santorini. Fira is the main town and Oia is the expensive, honeymoon part you’ve most likely seen on Pinterest and Instagram. But we were close to the black sand beach! And the island is small enough that we could get to Fira in about 20 minutes by bus or ATV.
We spent the first night exploring Perissa after a dinner of gyros.
The next day we laid on the beach and explored Fira and Oia. We watched the sunset in Oia which was absolutely beautiful.
I feel lied to about those blue roofs in Santorini! You see them in all the photos and I assumed every building would have a blue roof but only a few did. Most buildings did have blue trim but I was expecting more!
There was a ton of Tiffany blue though which I loved!
We spent three nights in Santorini which I felt was enough. Our last full day we rented ATVs in the morning to head up to Fira to look around more. There are so many beautiful restaurants overlooking the ocean. I desperately want to come back when I’m married and have more money to splurge!
To celebrate Chelsea’s birthday, we booked a sunset cruise on a 40 person catamaran through Santorini Day Tours. It had unlimited wine and ouzo, a Greek liquor that tastes like black licorice, and a full barbecue dinner.
We were picked up at our hotel at 1:40 p.m. and taken to the boat launch in Oia. As we were standing waiting for the catamaran, we looked around and saw all couples and older people.
“Well, guess we’re going to have to make our own fun,” we said to each other.
It ended up being a blast! We met four other young girls from Kentucky who were really fun. There was a young couple from Houston and a couple from the UK we hung out with.
The boat took us to hot springs first which unfortunately I couldn’t go in because I was wearing a white bathing suit and the captain said it would stain it yellow. So we just jumped off the boat and swam around for awhile.
They took us to two more spots for snorkeling while they cooked dinner. I stupidly dropped my sunglasses after jumping in with them on. Those were my third pair of sunglasses on my three month backpacking trip. They were only $8 but still! I really didn’t want to buy another pair. Chelsea and I snorkeled around trying to find them. When I spotted them, Chelsea dove the 10 meters to retrieve them. My hero!
More wine was poured as the sun started to set. We met a couple celebrating the man’s 60th birthday the same day as Chelsea. He desperately wanted to be 23 and was a ton of fun to hang out with.
The honeymoon, AARP cruise ended up being so much fun! We made plans with our Kentucky girls to meet up in two hours to go out but we got back to the hotel and completely crashed. We had to get up at 7 a.m. to head to Italy so we ended up skipping the night out.
I really loved how beautiful Santorini was. While my experience wasn’t exactly Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, I got a taste of the good life that I can hopefully one day live when I go back!