Rome

Down to the final stretch.
With about a week left we have reached Rome with a slight delay. Athens although seems to be in total chaos thanks to CNN, is in trouble but CNN fails to show the other 23 hours and 55 minutes of peaceful protest.

Santorini is one of the nicest places I have ever been, it is a great place; cheap, friendly, and a whole lot of fun. As we said in the last post we rented some ATVs and we drove the island of Santorini three of four times. We went to several beaches, up the highest hill, sunrises, sunsets, and cliff diving. Cliff Diving was a lot of fun, I have never done it but our cliff diving experience was over two days. Let me explain.

After a day of driving around the island, we go down to the beach have a few drinks and some guy tells us about cliff diving. Immediately I get so excited to search out this beach the next day. After we spend an hour or two trying to find the beach we finally arrive to find a bunch of people jumping off the cliffs. The cliffs themselves have different heights, any where from 10 to 100 feet. The higher you go the farther you also have to jump out. So the first day I though I was the coolest kid in the world. I jumped feet first about 30 feet, which means I had to jump out about 6 feet or so. This went just fine, until I saw kids about 10 years old and diving in from at least 60 feet. Admitting defeat we went back to the hostel for the night.

After talking to people around the hostel, I was ashamed that these young kids not only jumped from higher than I did but also dove. I could not have this happen. The next day we took a girl we met (from colorado) all the way around the island and ultimately made it back to the cliffs. I went strait up to the 60 foot spot and jumped feet first. Sweet, I jumped from 60 feet, but now needed to dive to beat those little kids. I go back up again and dive off and there I am thinking I am as cool as these kids. All of a sudden, what we find out is a 25 year old guy from the Greek Special Forces comes running off about 100 feet up, over the 30 feet he had to clear and makes a perfect landing in the water. Ya ya, no way am I going to do that but I still beat the kids. No more than five minutes later does this 10 year old kid run and does a perfect back flip into the water. I finally announced my defeat but seriously those kids were nuts. After defeat had been declared I wanted to dive one last time perfecting my dive. Success rate=0. I dive and going off it did not feel right and no more than a second later, I did a perfect flop on to my balls, feeling like they split in two the whole beach got their laugh for the day. Once again I was the champ, but not really. Not only was I not the champ for almost losing my ability to re-produce, I am pretty sure I may have landed just right to actually give my self a concussion because the 3 or 4 days I was a little woosey. For that my cliff diving days are finished. For now.

While on the worst 8 hour ferry ever, we start hearing things about how it is getting bad in Greece. And it was the vote to get the bail out money was happening but we thought we would be just fine. We get back to our apartment at about 1 am, wake up and we decide to head to Sam's cousins place around dinner time. Sam gets in to the shower and the power goes out. At that exact moment we both knew it was time to get out. We packed up our things and headed out to figure out our flight information for the next day. Canceled; so we were allowed a free transfer and the best we could get was a flight to Milan which was taking off right around the vote for the bail out money. We took what we could get and after a long two days of waiting we made it to Milan.

I thought we could stay in Milan and check out the sites but after reading about Milan there is not too much so we booked trains to Rome with a stop in Pisa for the next day. We went back into the train station, found a spot and spent the night in the train station. The night of sleep was not terrible which was surprising, but we had an early train and spending money for a quick night of sleep was not economical considering we only have a week left.

Four hours to Pisa, and I would have liked to stay longer but that tower is cool. I walked up and all we could do is laugh...whoops. That is about the extent of our stop in Pisa but it was really funny. We hurried back to the train station and caught an early train to Rome.

Here we are in Rome, about a week left, and down to the last few hundred in our bank accounts. We just have to see the city of Rome, get to Madrid, run with the bulls, and make it back for our flight on July 9. For now we will doing a lot of free tours, and hanging out.

ciao,
Michael and Sam