I've been lagging by a few days, so today I'm going to talk about what we're doing now and then circle back to what else we did on Santorini- none of it holding a candle, so to speak, to Friday night in Pyrgos.
We're at the point in the trip, and any of you who have traveled like this, spending a few days in one place, then going to another and then another, can relate to the thought, "Was that yesterday? What were we doing yesterday?" Today we are in Crete. We came in late afternoon yesterday by ferry from Santorini, and I'll start there.
We each have a big suitcase and a carry-on size bag. Everything rolls, but my bag in particular is very heavy. So we have tried to plan things so that we don't have to lug the luggage any more than necessary, so that meant keeping the car until we were ready to leave, dropping it at the airport, then taking a taxi to the ferry port so we could just walk onto the boat. This part worked fine. We got to the port, confirmed everything and learned where to go to get the boat, and then went and sat in a cafe until we saw it come in.
Getting on the ferry was a bit of a madhouse, though not in a bad way. We all rolled our bags up the ramp, which was conveniently ridged for traction and to make the rolling bags bump as much as possible. Then we put the big bags on a large luggage cart and crammed together to get to the seats. There were several hundred people getting on and exactly one person checking tickets. He kept trying unsuccessfully to get us to queue up, but we just massed around the door and eventually everyone got on.
The ferry ride itself was fine- smooth and not too late getting in. The debate had been how to get to the hotel from the ferry, because we knew it was close to the port, but we didn't really want to roll our bags all that way. Then, as we came in, we saw the hotel basically across the street from the port and I said to Ronnie- I think a taxi driver would spit on us if we asked them to drive us to that hotel. So we rolled over- it wasn't hard.
The hotel was in many ways the opposite of what we had in Santorini. That one was small and personal; this one is pretty big and kind of formal as thing go in Greece. It has possibly the worst feng shui I've ever seen in a hotel lobby. I cannot imagine who designed this thing and thought it was a good idea. But they gave us a very nice suite so we were okay with it. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant, which was fine and then watched some TV (they have Netflix! Not just Greek channels and BBC news!) and went to bed.
At 4 AM, I got up to go to the bathroom and when I got back in bed I began to hear a kind of high pitched sound, which got louder and louder and it became clear that someone was screaming in their room. I didn't hear anything that made it sound like anyone was getting physically hurt, but they were very very loud and very upset. I figured out how to call the front desk and they said they'd have security come. It was quiet for a couple of minutes and then started up again, so I called again. This time, I heard a door close and it was finally quiet, but it took us a long time to get back to sleep.
We got up, groggy and a bit grumpy, had breakfast and went to see the Knossos Palace, where the Minoan kings lived. I had some trepidation about this because I knew a lot of it had been reconstructed and didn't know how that would feel. We met our guide and went in. The guide was an older woman and my immediate thought was, well either she's really knowledgeable or she has a patter and wouldn't vary from it. Unfortunately it was the latter, so the whole thing was kind of disappointing. But the ruins were kind of interesting and the reconstructions weren't really inappropriate. The most interesting thing to me was the idea that the palace itself, which was huge even for a palace, was itself the mythical labyrinth.
Afterwards, we headed south, all the way. across the island, to Matala beach and caves. It was a very scenic hour drive and when we got there it was magical. The beach and the water are gorgeous; I could (and did) just stare at it endlessly.
The town and caves are famous as a hippie hangout, where Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell lived in the caves for a while. The caves were a hoot- you could certainly see how people could live there. Some were big, some were small, a few were connected, but they were arrayed on several levels of the cliffs. Easier to show than describe.
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