Beautiful Oia

Santorini on a map looks like a dragon embryo, and Oia is the village at the head. It is photographer heaven.  I have never been somewhere so small that packs so much punch.  It is overwhelming at times, and I had to be mindful of my obsession so that I could actually stop to enjoy its beauty.  There are no bad angles or dull walks, only beauty.

If you visit Santorini, then be sure to stay in Oia.  Its splendor is best savored over several days of careful inspection and and exploration. Like a movie that needs to be seen again and again with new points seen each time, Oia has a sort of charm that seems infinite.

And here is a big Oia photo dump. I have to move on to our next stop - Meteora.

That one blue dome in Santorini

Before arriving in Santorini, I felt like I had already been.  With all of the famous pictures out there, it is easy to conceive what it looks like.  Or so it seems.  While I did see a lot of familiar faces, like this blue domed church, the sheer impossibility of Santorini is something that must bee seen to be completely appreciated.

Cruising the caldera in Santorini

We took an afternoon cruise on a catamaran in the Santorini caldera

The three domes of Santorini

The quintessential Santorini shot 

Creepy puppet store in Santorini

Could you sleep in this room?

Our cave housing in Santorini

Lots of Santorini housing is in "caves" which are built into the caldera.  We stayed in such a place and it was very cool.

The bluest caldera

I keep reminding myself that Santorini is a collapsed volcano and all of the water in the middle is from a collapsed caldera that the ocean violently filled.

Stars over Santorini on a hot night in 2013

On a clear Santorini night, the stars light up the sky.  Kristin and I checked into our room, left, and came back around 10:30pm to find that our cave house was sweltering and our AC did not work.  It is not a traditional hotel, so we had no idea what to do, other than sleep in a warm cave and deal with it in the morning.

This was all before two things happened - we got lucky and then we met Rado.

Santorini sunset HDR

Santorini is as strange as it gets.  The ridge of a volcano on a collapsed caldera oft-known as Devil's Island, there is no place like it in the world.