Ember Travels

Good morning/good afternoon/buen dia where ever you are in the world! It is a lovely Tuesday morning in Sevilla, Spain and this marks the two month aniversary of my journey! I want to thank all of you, who I know and don`t know for your comments, messages and endless enthusasium for my travels. Your support has been amazing and it´s always nice to hear from a familiar face! A little bit about my travels...I am excited to be in a country where I  finally  speak the language! I arrived in Spain yesterday and plan to spend a few days in Sevilla, then head to Grenada where I can hopefully find a place to settle down for a month or so to practice my Spanish and meet some locals. Keep your fingers crossed, I´m not sure how the whole, "I want to rent a room for just a month" thing will go, but things always seem to work out, so I´m not too worried. A friend recently commented on my luck saying that I may actually be the center of the universe, so I´ll just bank on that :) Either way...

Im not gonna lie, mom and I were not terribly heartbroken to be leaving Greece.  After one too many run-ins with rude Greeks, an inconvenient and incomprehensible ferry schedule and a non functioning bank card, we were ready for a change in scenery and language.  Italy has everything I need to survive-cheap coffee, cheap gelato and delicious pizza. Unfortunately, I only have twenty-four hours to bask in its goodness, then I'm Croatia bound and mom is Rome bound. Our final days in Santorini were wonderful. We rented scooters again and  zipped around the island and spent a final night with our new American friends enjoying live music at our favorite Spanish-themed cafe before our one A.M. ferry departure.  This is where the journey starts to get really interesting, and we start wishing Greece was never even placed on the map.  We decided to book a hotel 3 Km outside of the main city on Kos Island.  It looked really nice online, and we thought something out of...

You know the classic question, "if you were stranded on a desert island what would you bring?" let me give you some insider tips; air conditioning, a book in English and some snorkel gear! We got to the island at two in the morning and spent our first half hour in paradise siting in a small car waiting and wondering where our driver taking us to the hotel had vanished to. Luckily, we were accompanied by a nice Australian couple headed to the same hotel. Together we watched all the cars and people disappear. The ferry departed on it's journey to Athens, and we were left alone, in Santorini at two in the morning. Finally, mom found our driver at his second job...a car rental shop, and we were soon on our way. The next morning, we saw the view out our hotel room and realized that Santorini is merely a giant sparsely populated volcanic rock in the middle of the Aegean. We began to wonder if the beautiful Santorini seen in the postcards was a big scam. The town we are staying ...

Friday evening we boarded a huge ferry to Santorini arriving at 1am sat. Ferry was larger than our San Juan Island ferries, 9 stories high, 2 decks full of 18 wheelers & cars, the rest was like a cruise ship. We snuck into the movie theater room, laid out on 3 comfortable seats & slept. Kris woke at midnight to the unmistakeable sounds of Grey's Anatomy & watched her favorite show in the middle of the Aegean Sea!! Upon picking us up, our host drove very fast up a series of narrow switchbacks to the top of the island with Kris telling him that "it was ok if he wanted to slow down!" Sunday found us renting motor scooters, driving around the whole island, swimming at the Red Beach, saw an awesome sunset at Oia - traditional Greek cliffside town, square white houses nestled into the hillside, narrow winding road transporting people up on donkeys! Oh yeah, we're livin' the dream :)

So Em & I are on the ferry to santorini.  Hope to get in around 1-2 am. Our hotel will pick us up, thank God! Time tables are very vague, Em & I have  been very lucky so far.  Great bus system throughout the country.  Got around Istanbul fantastically. Weather in the 80 s-90s, cool breezes @night; no humidity!  Our bus ride from Ephesus was great: ac, individual tv, juice & snacks served for FREE, seats that leaned back, etc countryside looks a lot like western CO. , low hills, deciduous trees, bushes; yet Arid. Now the coast is a different story! Rocky coast with white square bldgs. Built into the hillsides forming small villages; just like in the movies!  Our biggest challenges are finding free American-like toilets, changing our money, and finding places to fill our water bottles.  Most folks think we're French or European. So we're working on our French accents Merci!  Miss news about the States. Saw Obama w/Turkish President; don'...