Sail Crete

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Thursday, October 28
It rained all of last night, with some serious lightning and thunder happening, so this morning when we went out to explore Chania we lit a candle for the guys, for luck. Chania, when you aren’t driving, is really very beautiful. We explored all sorts of tiny alleys full of shops and little restaurants. I splurged and bought myself a foursome of BEAUTIFUL mugs for my apartment next semester. Really big ones I can hold with both hands and brightly coloured. There was some sort of military thing in the square this morning and we watched them getting all lined up. My FAVORITE part was the clarinet in the band who was warming up by playing the Star Wars theme! I wish Logan could have heard that. We decided to leave the big roads and head cross-country to Gallini so we started out by going in circles on the peninsula in front of Chania for half an hour. A very auspicious beginning. The rain quit for the morning, so the roads were dry, the skies sunny, and even getting lost couldn’t put a damper on our spirits, as it doesn’t really matter when you don’t know where you’re going in the first place! We returned to the major road to head in the right direction for at least half an hour and then took another small road headed straight up the mountain in a series of dramatic switchbacks. Really I took the turn because it was halfway in the right direction and a sign said that there were ruins up that direction, and I wanted my “rubble fix” for the day. I sure got it. There is a beautiful fortress and village thing in Apetra (I think that’s the name) with history dating back to the Minoans. I took a ton of pictures of the Roman cisterns and theater that were on the site, and the baths, and, well, everything else, of course. I stayed as long as I thought kind and returned to find Kar napping in the vehicle. Ooops☺ We stopped for lunch in the little town below the ruins and had the best food we’ve had so far. Or we were really hungry. Either way the food was delicious and the restaurant filed with interesting people, mostly Greek, who were all chattering away on the terrace. From there we headed South across the mountains and saw gorgeous valleys filled with olive orchards, fields of sheep, more castle ruins, I hiked a bit in a gorge above the sea, and then we drove East along the coastline (Which really meant up and down and back and forth mostly along the coast). The roads on our map marked orange are called secondary roads. Well. I am getting used to narrow roads, but some of the places we squeezed through today wee pretty small! The towns are absolutely “darling” as Kar says, really teeny and cute. There were several herds of goats on the road at various times, I passed a horse, the forest that we drove through were SOOO beautiful, and full of birds singing. Crete seems to have all the critters that I was expecting on all of the little islands. I saw a couple really cool lizards in the ruins in Apetra, one with a blue tail. So we zigged and zagged all the way along to Gallini, which we arrived at around 630 and were welcomed into Hotel Rea, shown to a room on the third floor with a balcony overlooking the harbour, and assured that the breakfast would be “very good.” The man running the place is really sweet, and keeps breaking into German while he talks, which is slightly confusing, more so because he has a massive chunk of chew in his lip all the time. The room, by the way, is less than half the cost of the previous nights. We should have been hunting these type places down the whole time. We wandered around a bit before finding a place to eat. I had fantastic stuffed eggplant and Kar had fish (much of which we snuck to the kitties under the table). Our waiter, who knew of Wyoming because of the Lucky Luke cartoons he read as a kid, was absolutely adorable and wouldn’t let us leave before “following procedure” which meant that he brought out dessert and a couple shots of raki on the house. Oooh man, that stuff is like drinking really really bad whiskey. It does not go down smoothly. Tomorrow I think we’ll play around here for a while and then head back to Heraklion, so that we have a least a day to explore the city and head up to Knossos. I am not leaving without going there and to the Archaeological museum in the city. The duckbilled dolphin fresco? It’s there.

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