Good news for anyone with a Greek Isles sailing on the calendar: Santorini's iconic port path is open again. The stepped route from the old port in the Bay of Fira up to the capital town of Fira reopened on August 3, and the Port of Fira is back to business as usual.

Quick recap for the people who tuned out the moment we said the word infrastructure: on July 27, a private wall bordering the famous Karavolades Stairs collapsed, making the whole path impassable. With foot traffic — and donkey traffic — shut down, the only way up was the Santorini Cable Car, which handles a cruise-ship crowd about as gracefully as a phone booth handles a marching band. So from July 28, authorities quietly relocated cruise operations seven miles away to the ferry port at Athinios, a 25-minute bus or taxi ride from Fira, and ran every shore excursion out of there instead.

The Mayor of Thira, Anastasios Nikolaos Zorzos, made it official this month: the danger has been addressed, the blocking order is revoked, and pedestrians (and mules) can traverse the stairs again. With that, the island's usual traffic rule snaps back into place — up to 70% of cruise guests come ashore at the old port at Fira, no more than 30% through Athinios.

Here's why this actually matters for your planning: Santorini takes in more than 1.2 million cruise guests a year, this is peak season (June through mid-September), and there's a daily cap of 8,000 passengers. There are still 60 ship calls scheduled for the rest of August alone — MSC, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, Celebrity, Princess, the whole gang. Reassuringly, no port calls were reportedly cancelled during the closure; guests just got rerouted.

The moral, as always, is the one we keep repeating on the show: read your port updates before you book that non-refundable sunset tour. And maybe tip the donkey. It has had a rough two weeks.