Greece - Crete

October 8-10

Crete, Greece was spectacularly beautiful. Our pictures don’t even do it justice, but I’ll put them up anyway! We ended up staying in a little town on the eastern side of the island called Agios Nikolous, and we’re so glad we made the trip over there.  We arrived very early in the morning, and found this old Venetian Port right by where we came in:

We then hopped on a bus over to Agios Nikolous, and this was one of the first scenes that greeted us:

We had lunch overlooking the lagoon, which,, according to mythology, is where Athena used to take baths. Apparently they used to think the lagoon was bottomless, but discovered otherwise when Jacques Cousteau explored it (he’s the only person ever to go in the lagoon, other than Athena of course).

View from lunch

The whole walk to our cute little hotel was so picturesque, we (almost) didn’t even mind how lost we got because we got to enjoy the views for longer!

Our hotel was lovely, we loved being able to stay in one spot for two nights in a row, plus how could we not love it when we woke up to this view?!

We had so much fun just exploring the town, relaxing, and being tourists :)

Random shop in Crete

I don't know the significance of the bull because the sign was in Greek, but we had to get a picture.

One thing I have to say about Greece is that there are stray dogs everywhere. Near our hotel there was an unofficial humane society (abandoned structure) with probably 20 dogs just hanging out and barking at whoever walked by. Now Thomas and I love dogs, and they were all surprisingly clean and well behaved, but it was a little heartbreaking to see all these cute dogs with no homes. Unfortunately the ferries don’t allow dogs on board, otherwise Max and Zoe might have had a little surprise waiting for them when they get to England!

On our way back to the main port in Heraklion, we stopped off at the Crete Aquarium. I won’t bore you with all of my sea creature pictures (I always take too many at aquariums), so here are my favorites:

Does this underbite remind you of someone?

Do you see the resemblance?! :)

This creepy guy was smiling at me

Our last stop was in Knossos, Crete, which is where there are ancient Minoan ruins. The palace that was here had over 1,200 rooms and was built thousands of years ago. It’s been partially restored, but it’s crazy to think that we are looking at something that was created so long ago.

What the palace used to look like - crazy!

We had some time to kill before our boat left, so we sat and enjoyed the beautiful blue water.

The beautiful view without us messing it up!

We were going to take the ferry from a port in Greece to Ancona, Italy tonight and then take the train to Rome…but that ferry doesn’t run today (of course). So we decided to take the ferry to Venice instead since that leaves tonight! It takes a little bit longer, and changes our itinerary a little, but since we don’t have concrete plans anyways, it doesn’t really mess us up!

Originally I wanted to fit all of these cities into the Italy part of our trip: Florence, Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Milan, and Pompeii. I then realized I was being a little overzealous, so we narrowed it down to Venice, Rome, and Milan.  I really want to visit Tuscany (and the rest of them), but now we leave some options for if we want to go back to Italy later. Or if anyone wants to meet us in Italy ;)