A Bus tour in Parts - Emporio and Perissa Black sand beach

The previous post in this series is here..

After the ruins our next stop was the largest village in the middle of Santorini island called Emporio. It included a small castle, beautiful small walkways (that reminded me of the Galli's of Varanasi) and a village center with a rebuilt Church.

This all blue and white combination gave us the best family pictures on this trip.. 

we had a good laugh over this sign..there was a lot of potential at this place.. but a lot of hard work to be done.. given my history of house remodeling projects, the family kept mocking me for a good 10 minutes..

fortunately we arrived at the next photo spot 

The whole place seemed to be desolate with no inhabitants (a few of these old places are now Airbnb's apparently) but we did not see a single resident in that walk. 

After touring the old Emporio area, we walked back down and headed to Perissa. Saw this "cheese" church on the way down!

There is a beautiful black sand beach here and a lot of eating places around the beach. If you eat in a restaurant, they let you use the beach umbrellas for free (in some cases 10 Euros).

We observed that most of the folks who were waiters and ushers in these restaurants were Syrian. There is some Syria Greek connection we don't know about. These folks were extremely nice and kept making jokes and made us laugh as we tried to decide our lunch location..

it was a bad idea to go into the water after a heavy lunch.. but went into the water with the kids for a good 30 minutes. That was part of the tour and the break. Almost everyone in our group had someone from the family go into the water as the rest of the party sat on the reclining chairs and were taking photos of their feet while sipping drinks!

Jr. ventured into the water with me (as did the little one for some time) and took pics of me doing yoga poses on rocks. One of these is very slippery and I got my legs cut up in a few places.. 

It was a pleasant afternoon, thanks to the clouds!

Post water, we had some yummy ice cream and we drove off to our next stop! 

 

We said bye to Aquarius and started back on the bus tour to the next stop..

saw more churches and blue domed houses on the way..

A short video of this segment of the trip..

The next stop was a drive up the hill to the tallest point on the other side of the island with a lot of weird history!