That'll do Donkey. That'll do.

When we last saw Char and Brad, they had just enjoyed their anniversary in Venice...
After that, we headed off to Trieste on the advisable the poorly translated
Tourist page. Thankfully, Trieste was pretty good. We saw a really big cave, and it was really big. The name of the cave, when translated, is actually "The Big Cave." It was big and only about 11 degrees inside. That was nice too.
We saw a castle and surrounding gardens there as well, the gardens were the best gardens we've seen this trip.
We got up the next day and started a marathon of traveling to reach our next destination: Piraeus, Greece. Here's the rundown: two hour train ride to back to Venice, a few hours of waiting, then a huge 36 hour ferry ride down the Adriatic to Patras, Greece. We arrived there after two nights of sleeping on the hard deck at about 5 in the morning. Then onto a 3 hour bus ride to Pireaus. Thankfully we found our hotel really easily and were able to check in right away. We made arrangements to get to Santorini the next day on a short 8 hour ferry ride.
Then, I (Brad) went to see if I could book our train tickets from Athens to Thessaloniki for when we get back from Santorini. We hadn't been able to do this yet because we literally couldn't. We tried to make reservations from Rome but were told that the only way to book tickets in Greece was to actually be physically present in the Greek statio. That you were traveling from. So we had to wait. So I made my way into Athens to the main train station and stood in line. I was then told by the clerk that I couldn't book tickets for August because, well I don't really know why. I was just told quite adamantly that I couldn't. So that was that. We're hoping to get tickets the day we travel. There are several trains going every day so we should be able to get something.
Anyways, we are now on Santorini and it is great!

Our hotel offers so many wonderful things like air conditioning, easy bus access, a pool, and pick up service from the port. Let me (Char) tell you there are only a few ways to get to the top and into the city. One way is to walk, which is ok if are ok with walking up some 400 uneven steps, and arriving sweaty at the top. The other way is to take a van, which is pretty good as it is air conditioned and rather comfortable. But I think the best (and Brad would agree with me on this) mode of transportation to the top is by donkey. Yesterday we experienced this first hand. We rOde to the top on donkeys. It was Awesome. My donkey in particular did not want to go, and whereas brad used encouraging words with his, I was attempting the clicking noises to make it go. However once the driver started to yell at it it decided it would go and quickly. Needlesss to say it was really really fun. Hh