Frozen_North_Dave

TRAVELS IN GREECE – PART 1

We travelled for two and a half weeks in Western Crete, (based in Chania and Loutro), Folegandros and Santorini in early May of this year and had an amazing trip. After our first vacation in 2005 when we fell in love with the Greek Islands we scrapped the idea of Italy for our next trip and decided to return to Greece. We want to go back again. Since we obtained so much great information from this Forum, I thought I’d contribute some travel reports.

To put us in context - we are David and Kathy, aged 48 and 47, hailing from Northern Ontario Canada. We are in good physical shape, interested in moderately adventurous, off-the-beaten-track travel, with some hiking, eating lots of good food and sipping great local wine, and splitting our time between attacking the popular tourist sites and wandering off to savour the local atmosphere. An entire afternoon at a Taverna by the seaside is as important as seeing the Acropolis and the local museum. We hate driving. Slow travel is our mantra. That’s us.

(A warning, the first part of this installment involves our tale of packing and travelling which you may find tedious or hopefully, mildly amusing.)


IN THIS INSTALLMENT we discover the following truths:

1. We are not the Smartest Bunnies In The Forest when it comes to packing for a three week trip to the Greek Islands.

2. Charles de Gaulle airport was designed by the same people that make the ingenious Roach Motel. You can check in, but whether or not you can then find your way out remains in the hands of a higher force.

3. The Greek Shrug is an art form which can, in a nano-second, convey an amazing variety of sentiments from “I’m so sorry you just severed your limb and urgently require medical attention but I’m having my coffee right now” to “I’m so sorry that you have 25 minutes to catch your Olympic Airlines Flight but this 1,000 strong snaking mob of people in front of you is the Greek way we do things – so get in line buddy and hope for the best”.

4. Greek food is most excellent and Greek wine is a “Good Thing”, (as Martha would say), and it is best to seek out the Tavernas where the local Greeks are eating and not the empty places with the glossy laminated pictures of “Greek Food for Dummies” located at the entrance.

5. Porto del Colombo is a great hotel in Chania which we would recommend highly but if you are not the Smartest Bunnies In The Forest (see Number 1 above) ask for a room on the first floor to avoid carrying 72 kilos of luggage up (and back down) three flights of stairs.

6. Western Crete is a wonderful, spectacular, unique part of Greece with friendly people and incredible natural beauty and the old town of Chania is picturesque and charming.


Packing Cubes, Ballistic Clad Meteors, Not the Smartest Bunnies in the Forest:

I was never very good in physics. Apparently I’m also fuzzy on the whole conversion of pounds to kilos thing as well. So, when the nice lady at the Air France ticket counter in Toronto informed us that we would be required to fork over $100 to get our two overweight bags on the plane, or otherwise repack them into four bags, before we even started the vacation we knew we were in trouble. After swearing to each other that on our next trip we would be traveling with a toothbrush, a packet of Kleenex and a Visa Card we tried to figure out what went wrong. Aside from the obvious (“You brought too many clothes and too many shoes you Dolts!) we realized our mistake. On our last trip we had discovered that wonderful invention – the packing cube. That vinyl “envelope” with the Velcro and the plastic card is the smartest packing aid on the planet. We got ours from Eagle Creek. They’re great. You fold all your clothes in these nice tight rectangles, pile them up and compress them into these little bundles and Voila! – Bob’s your Uncle! You shove these nifty, dense cubes of clothing into your suitcase and you have SCADS of room.

We had ten packing cubes. Yes…TEN. Those of you who took physics, and are much smarter than we are, see the problem. When you “C-O-M-P-R-E-S-S” things they are heavier! Dummies like me – “Wow – look at all the extra space in the suitcase – let’s pack more!” -- shouldn’t be allowed to leave the driveway at home! We were even more embarrassed when we met a lovely couple in their seventies in Folegandros on their thirtieth trip to Greece, who were traveling with two bags half (and I mean HALF) the size of our carry on bags! We may not be that efficient, but we swore – never again.

The good thing was that our luggage was checked through to Athens (or so we thought) so in theory we wouldn’t have to deal with the two Swiss Army meteorites encased in water-proof ballistic material until we were in Greece.

The Air France flight was pleasant – as pleasant as can be crammed into the standard economy class seat. The Air France food was a cut above the average airplane fare and France’s national airline seems committed to maintaining the French reputation for good food. There was a tasty baguette that tasted like bread. Entrees were hot, moist, tasty and far removed from the usual “goop” covering leathery dried meat. Good cheese and dessert. Some great wines, cognac after dinner with good coffee. It was a nice way to start the vacation.

Charles de Gaulle, Our Luggage Enjoys Extra Time in Paris, The Greek Shrug:

And then we landed in Paris. Which leads me to the topic of: “The EVIL that is Charles De Gaulle Airport”.

As background, when I went searching for flight options to Greece this time, the cheapest option was flying into one of the Europe hubs and a connecting flight to Athens. The question was which hub. We had flown British Airways last time and had a great experience. But the two week-long closures at Heathrow last year made me think that it might be better to consider an alternate where the risk of delayed or cancelled flights would be minimized. So I picked Air France. I did the research on the Airline – better than average airplane food, good service, reliable, they all said. We had over a three hour gap in Paris on the way to Athens, (with 1 and a half hours on the way back). I went for it.

What I had NOT done is check these forum boards and others, on the topic of connections through CDG airport in Paris. If I had, I would have learned that missed connections through the CDG airport is a common occurrence and a hot topic. If you’re interested, go into the Fodor’s France Forum or the “Airwise” web site, type in CDG and any terminal (ours were blessedly close to each other - 2D and 2F) and take a look at the ranting and raving about connections through CDG. You’ll even see some bad words. If France is your final destination then there are few or no problems. It’s the connections that make things interesting.

I thought Heathrow was bad. Holy Crap is Charles de Gaulle busy! And enormous. And frenetic, and poorly designed, and unfinished, and poorly labeled…but with really cool architecture. The French are infamous for their cutting-edge, thought-provoking modern and futuristic architecture and the Terminal 2 buildings (there are six massive separate parts) are examples of this French flair for the avant-garde. (The TGV station is also incredible). Of course you only see these architectural wonders as a fuzzy blur as you frantically careen through the corridors and concourses trying desperately to get from point A to point B and feeling like one of those experimental mice in a maze.

I swear there is a darkened room in Charles de Gaulle airport, with banks of security cameras, where all the staff sneak away (since they sure as hell are not, as advertised, at the gate ready to guide you to your connecting flight!) to point and laugh at the stampedes of tourists helplessly trying to find their way to their flight. I can just imagine Jean-Pierre munching on his morning Pain de Chocolat, laughing with his buddies and pointing at the screens filled with endless hordes of zombie-like tourists wandering aimlessly through the cavernous terminals: “Attendez. Look at zat one zere Louis! Ze won avec le Disney shirt. He is going down ze same hall to ze men’s toilette for ze fifth time…Tee Hee Hee….And zat couple zer off zee plane from Canada – zey are headed to the TGV to Dusseldorf instead of Terminal Deux-D. Ar Ar Ar”

Perhaps my imagination gets the best of me, and yes I exaggerate slightly, but due to the sheer enormity of its size CDG is a bit of a logistical nightmare even when you know were you are going. We had plenty of time to make our connections on the way to Athens, so we were not too concerned as we stepped off the Toronto flight at six a.m. When you check in Air France gives you this nice booklet with maps of the terminals and tells you that all “Correspondence” (connection) passengers will find an army of helpful airport staff ready to guide you to where you want to go. “Hah!” “Hah” I say again. As we walked off the jet way the 450+ passengers from our flight merged with umpteen hundreds more from an adjacent offloading flight from Lagos into a tiny bottleneck that looked more like my parent’s dimly lit rec room in the seventies. Passengers stared blankly at screens, drifted into one of three queues (to where, no one knew). The one CDG staff member surrounded by a mob of people asking for directions was very friendly but spoke no English and we couldn’t even get to him. The other lady we approached directed us into a line-up without asking us where we were going. It was not where we wanted to go. When we asked again, she began giving us instructions before we could finish telling her where we wanted to go. Not helpful. She pointed us in another (wrong) direction, again. We decided we had nothing to lose and headed off in what seemed to be a direction towards 2D. We eventually found a customs line up, exited and got to the concourse past the TGV station to 2D. The Departure hall in 2F is actually quite cool. Terminal 2D also looks nifty but the architect never asked anyone whether it would be quite so nifty when the 275 people trying to get to a departure gate were jammed into a space the size of an average fast-food restaurant with a few thousand other people trying to walk (or barrel) through them to their gates (some travelling at break-neck speeds with hard cased luggage flying behind them).

Queuing up and line-ups must be a North American thing. The boarding calls at all of the airports we passed through this vacation in Paris and Greece were more in the form of Rugby scrums than orderly boarding of an aircraft. It was unique experience in Paris to be hip-checked by a woman in a beautiful Chanel suit off the Paris fashion runway and Prada shoes and bumped aside by a man in a spiffy business suit with a leather brief case worth more than my car just to be the first to get on a plane.

We got to Athens. Kathy’s suitcase didn’t, but we did. With a 3 hour layover in Paris it boggled my mind that a suitcase couldn’t make it from one airplane to another. Maybe they were worried the plane might not get airborne with the weight of it! We had a two hour buffer for our Olympic flight to Chania. That quickly narrowed to 30 minutes by the time we waited to confirm that we were missing a suitcase, and stood in the agonizingly slow line up at the lost luggage counter in the Athens Airport (since there were apparently a number of lost bags).

After confirming arrangements to forward the bag to Crete the next day, we raced to the Departure Levels only to discover not less than a 1,000 people in a massive snaking line-up for Olympic Airlines, and only five check-in counters opened. There was just no way we were going to make the flight.

I love the Greek shrug. You ask a question that you feel involves an urgent, timely matter that will impact upon your life to some significant degree and necessitates a firm, definite response. And you get “The Shrug”. The two shoulders go up in the direction of the ears, the head tilts, the hands extend, the person smiles or flutters his or her eyes and in a single gesture tells you “Who knows/Whenever/Oh Well/Too Bad/That’s Greece”. As we frantically got to what seemed to be the end of a winding lineup for every bloody Olympic Flight departing from Athens in the next week I asked the Olympic lady extending the strap to lengthen the line-up yet further if there was a SHORT line for a flight leaving in 25 minutes. The Shrug. “Here”, she says pointing to the shuffling crowd. Another man came up behind us asking the same question for a flight leaving in only 15 minutes. Again The Shrug. “There is no short line – this is it”.

I instructed Kathy not to move and raced around the mob to the front. Through the bedlam I heard one of the check-in staff yell over the crowd “Chania”. Ignoring the hundreds of people behind me I pushed my way through to the lady at the ticket counter. There was a rather heated argument in Greek going on between two ladies at the front of the line. Though I’ll never know, they seemed to be arguing about who was next. Family members were jumping into the fray. I took advantage of the diversion, and told the lady at the counter of our urgent need to get a boarding pass to Chania. “You can do it now”, was the answer. There seemed little chance to rationally explain that I had a wife and hundreds of pounds of compressed clothing in ballistic anvils located at the back of the line so I took off past some very angry people to the back of the line, and grabbed Kathy and the luggage. Back to the front of the line. We were lucky, the argument had escalated and a Greek Orthodox Priest seemed to have somehow joined in (an interested party or rendering divine justice on the issue?) and now arms were waving. Uncharacteristic for we, the polite orderly Canadians, so used to the orderly universe of line-ups, - we rudely pushed to the check-in counter and pleaded for boarding passes. The Olympic lady was great. Grasping the urgency of the matter she processed the luggage without any thought of weight allowance and not bothering to asking if a member of the Taliban had assisted us in packing nuclear warheads in our luggage (which was again plausible given the weight). We were racing down the terminal, held our breath through the blue smoky haze of the Athens Airport Food Court, and arrived at the gate. We made it with ten minutes to spare.

We were certain the luggage could not possibly get to Chania with us. But, as a testament to the excellent state-of-the-art baggage handling system installed in the new Athens airport before the Olympics, or good luck, all the bags rolled off the carousel in Chania (all of them except Kathy’s suitcase which of course was still holidaying in Gay Paree).

We were ready to start our vacation.

(……Part 1 to be continued)

Frozen_North_Dave

TRAVELS IN GREECE - PART 1 - Continued

Chania, Porto del Colombo and Greek Bathrooms

Chania was wonderful. Uniquely Greek, and yet so different from the Cycladic Islands, or Athens. The mix of Venetian and Turkish and late 19th century architecture in the old city, wrapped around the pretty harbour front, has charm and character. The streets and building are clean and proudly maintained by shopkeepers and residents. That unsightly and ugly growing trend of vandals who use paint cans to scar historic buildings that survived brutal wars, seems to have been kept to a minimum. (Not so, in Heraklion!). We spent four days in Chania with one of them spent in the Samaria Gorge. We strolled the city, visited the sights, the Mosque (with a great art exhibition by a local artist), the Catholic Church hidden off the side street, the little folk museum, the Market, the ramparts and the Kastelli. We wandered the back streets, did some shopping. We walked the sea walls to the lighthouse and tried to substitute a fast-paced sight-seeing agenda with a more laid-back, slow paced experience of Chania.

There is no vehicular traffic allowed in much of the old city so the driver arranged by our most-excellent travel agency, Aegean Thesaurus, let us off at the closest point near the museum. We just had to walk up the street and over a few hundred feet. And so began the first of many Luggage Exercise Workouts, maneuvering the Ballistic Covered Anvils (and our carry-ons) along the not-so even streets. Up stairs. And down Stairs. And up some more stairs. And down again….

We stayed at Porto del Colombo and would highly recommend this moderately priced and well maintained hotel on the western end of the harbour, about one street back. Just across the street from its very classy neighbour, the Casa Delfino, the Porto del Colombo is located in a beautiful historic, three story Venetian building. The entrance is particularly striking as a wide expansive set of cobbled steps rises up near the front corner. Stone, marble and stucco is everywhere, with the traditional wood beam and high wood ceilings on each floor.

The staff at Porto del Columbo were very pleasant and helpful. In addition to the lady at the desk during the week, there were two young ladies who, although limited in their English, (with our non-existent Greek) were able to assist us. When we arrived we were checked into our room on the top floor up three (count-em three) looooong flights of a beautiful winding wooden staircase. I had known full well that there was no elevator in the Hotel and this seemed like an inconsequential and trivial matter when selecting the hotel back in Canada months before. Now, when we had been up for 28 hours, and had run the CDG Airport Lab Rat Maze Marathon, the task of getting even the one suitcase up the stairs brought tears to our eyes. But we were excited and anxious to hit our first Greek Taverna, so together we dragged the bags up the stairs. The next day, when we arrived with the second suitcase retrieved from the airport, the saintly lady cleaning the rooms took pity on us and insisted on helping to carry the bag up the last two flights of stairs.

The room was charming, with wood floors and wood beamed high ceilings. There were ancient iron rings still in the stone and stucco wall beside the small window looking over the little roof top. (My imagination kicked in with images of Turkish princes chained in Venetian palaces. Alternatively perhaps they tethered the donkeys in this room who were required to haul the hundreds of pounds of luggage to the third floor brought by visiting Venetian aristocrats who also weren’t bright enough to pack light.) The bathroom was small but had character, with a curved stone alcove where the shower was located. The shower, like all Greek bathing receptacles, was small, cozy and sometimes required some acrobatic maneuvers practiced only by Cirque du Soleil and circus performers in order to get the water to your nether regions.

With only two trips to Greece under our belts we are hardly experts, but I have created three classifications of Greek Bathing Receptacles (aside from the expansive showers found in the high-end hotels).

First there is the “TUPPERWARE CLASS”. These are small square basins resembling the largest of the Tupperware containers we use to store leftovers in our fridge. There are no walls. They sometimes have a little stool or formed seat while you bathe, and only occasionally are large enough to accommodate your backside such that it does not feel like a pressed ham. After you enter, your knees are around your nose. After you have adjusted the water temperature on the hand-held hose you have about 4 minutes of hot water left to wet yourself, lather, wash and rinse. Putting the hose down to use both hands to get the nether regions or your hair, results in water spraying every which way (sometimes in your face) and often all over most of the remaining four square feet of bathroom, including the clothes you mistakenly tossed on the floor before you started and most certainly the bath mat. By the time you coordinate the maneuvers, you have usually exhausted the hot water in the tiny Greek water-conscious hot-water tanks. You thus finish with a bracing cold blast of water just as you are finishing up. If you are male, this shrinks things. You step out onto the soaked bath mat, shivering with teeth chattering, and reach for the towel-the-size-of-a-tissue that, you realize, was also on the floor.

The second classification of Greek bathing receptacle is the “REFRIGERATOR CLASS”. These stand-up receptacles contain about the same volume of space as the average stand-up North American Fridge. When you close the door (if you can), and adjust the water temperature, you are invariably going to next slam the faucet or some plumbing fixture into your elbow or take out a hip joint as you turn or bend to grab the soap or shampoo. Genitals are usually also a high-risk zone for guys. Shuffling to aim the water to cover all parts of your body (which usually can’t be done) involves alternative but equally challenging, Circus acrobatic maneuvers. You can remove the hand held hose from it’s hook and aim it accordingly, but in doing so you are likely to again slam your hip or elbow into the plumbing fixture, or worse…..important mid-section body parts. Since the shower doors rarely close completely you have likely sprayed water over the same four square feet of bathroom, including the bath mat and your clothes thrown where you thought they were outside the bathing zone. The hot water is again gone by this time and you usually finish with a bracing blast of cold water. If you are male you are, by this time, speaking in a high-pitched voice and glad you have fathered all the children you wanted. Honeymooners beware.

The third classification is the “STUCK-IN-THE-CORNER SPARTAN CLASS”. This the classification which confuses North Americans because there is nothing that resembles a shower or a tub in the bathroom and you begin to open closet doors looking for the real bathroom. You soon realize that the bathing receptacle is basically a corner of the small tiled bathroom, with a hand-held hose, and a floor that theoretically is sloped to allow the water run to a drain but invariably does not. Lacking any confinement you actually might be able to shower in a time efficient manner and may thus finish your bathing before the water turns icy cold. Your body parts are also usually safer because you won’t bang into anything. However, if your Wife happens to be putting on her make-up at the sink adjacent to the Corner Class bathing area, you may discover that you have inadvertently drenched your better half who now has mascara streaking down her face, with hair matted to her face and looks that could kill. Since there is no separation between the bathing area and the toilet, sink or your wife, every square inch of the bathroom and it’s contents are now covered in water including the roll of toilet paper, your undies, your bath mat and the tissue-sized towel. It will matter very little, since your Wife, as pay-back, has removed anything from the bathroom that would allow you to dry yourself. Sitting on the toilet immediately after bathing, with the Stuck-In-The-Corner Class of Bathing Receptacle can be hazardous to your health (and embarrassing) as your wet backside may slide off of, or worse, into the middle of, the wet toilet seat.

I digress. Aside from the standard quirks of the Greek bathing receptacle (no different from any other hotel in Greece) which is part of the true Greek vacation experience, the Porto Del Colombo Hotel was a great old-world, charming mid-sized hotel. (There was actually plenty of hot water and only minimal discomfort in the Refrigerator Class Shower. My undies did get soaked however.) The hotel is located right off the waterfront and within easy walking distance of anything, including the bus station and the majority of the Tavernas (there seems to be five per square block). The breakfast in the morning was basic: sweet bread, toast, jam, coffee or tea, and of course creamy Greek Yogurt with Honey – nothing exceptional but satisfying and pleasant. We’d highly recommend Porto Del Colombo as a charming, pleasant mid-priced hotel, with a great location in the old town. However, pack accordingly or bring a spouse the size of an NFL linebacker to haul the luggage up the stairs (I certainly don’t fit in that category, wimp that I am, and Kathy will be pleased that I clarify that she also is not of such hulking stature!)

Explorations in Chania – Great Greek Food

We made a trip to the Market which is the Cross-Shaped indoor market near the south boundary of the old city. Although a good portion of the market seems stocked with the standard tourist fare and trinkets, there are also stalls selling produce, fish and meats. It was interesting seeing fresh bunny-rabbit fully skinned except for the little furry rabbit feet – obviously not so lucky for the rabbit. The fish stalls were packed with beautiful fresh fish and seafood, some of it still wriggling and squirming. There was fresh produce, herbs and a good assortment of the great fresh produce, meats and ingredients you are enjoying at the local restaurants of Chania. One of the neatest things was when I looked down and saw two huge straw baskets filled with live snails, moving and wiggling ever so slowly. Later at dinner I tried the little critters as the basic ingredient in the Cretan delicacy of snails in wine or tomato sauce. There was also a bakery selling heavenly sweets and baking including bougatsa.

In another stall one lady was happy to share her knowledge and provided a lesson in the grades and types of the prized Cretan olive oil. The bags of dried herbs are sold in bulk. It almost hurt to see the huge pails and containers of awesome creamy feta cheese and the “Yogurt of the Greek Gods” that we can’t get enough of in Greece every morning at breakfast. The thought of adding THAT to our luggage was a tortuous dream. And of course, there were cans and bottles by the hundred of that incredible thyme Greek honey, a specialty in Crete. The discovery of Greek Thyme Honey and creamy Greek yogurt on our first vacation was like an epiphany. I never liked yogurt and honey was….well honey - something you occasionally put in your tea or added to a recipe back home. But after we had Greek Yogurt drizzled with gobs and gobs of sweet, amber, nutty, thyme scented honey (and nuts or berries added) we thought we’d found breakfast heaven. There is nothing like Greek Honey and the Cretan honey is amazing.

If you enjoy cooking, and want to check out Greek ingredients, don’t miss the Chania market.

As you can tell, we like to eat. We fell in love with Greek cooking during our first trip. Sitting in a Greek Taverna for hours enjoying terrific fresh ingredients, simply done, with great local red and white wines is something to be savoured and which makes memories. It is always particularly good when sitting by the Aegean sea, watching the sunlight twinkle off that special blue water and people watching. The Greek concept of never rushing a meal, where eating is a social event is so very sensible. And never bringing the cheque until it is demanded is also so civilized (unlike North America where you are sometimes told when you sit down that the restaurant wants “the table back” for the next seating!). Instead of the “On Your Mark. Get Set. Eat!” approach to North American dining, in Greece you are always welcome to spend hours, if you like, sipping and tasting and eating and enjoying good company. Which is exactly what we like to do in Greece.

We had great food in Chania. We had researched the various restaurants before leaving. We unfortunately couldn’t get to all of them in four days. Particularly memorable was Apostolos 2 (there is an Apostolos 1 as well – the second one is almost the last restaurant at the very end of the inner Harbour at the start of the walk to the sea wall). Our first meal was enjoyed in the late afternoon on our first day with the sun warming our pale Canadian faces. The fava (oh so creamy), the Greek salad (fresh tomatoes and cukes bursting with flavour and the “slab” of feta cheese). Roasted vegetables. We ordered the grill plate for two people….that could really feed six. The grilled shrimp and cod and small fish exploded with simple fresh tastes of the sea, and good olive oil. We discovered the Cretan wines are excellent. The always-gratuitous sweets at the end of the meal at Apostolos included tiny hot phyllo triangles drenched in warm honey and two plates of spoon sweets with a tiny bottle of ice cold tskoudis. We returned again our last evening in Chania where the meal was every bit as memorable, but a bit windy.

Chania Harbour and the Old Town

We had spent the first day and a half (Friday and Saturday) exploring Chania and enjoying the sunshine and the ambiance of Western Crete. We had been required to make a quick taxi detour back to the airport on Saturday to pick up Kathy’s suitcase. The suitcase arrived safely, looking none-the-worse-for the wear, having enjoyed it’s extra Parisian holiday. (We could tell because the suitcase smelled of gaulloises cigarettes and pastis, and looked like it had spent the wee hours of the morning in some French café engrossed in deep philosophical discussions with some local ratty intellectual Louis Vuitton garment bag arguing about Jean-Paul Sartre and dark and disturbing French films.) The Suitcase, although a better bag for having enjoyed a cosmopolitan sojourn in the City of Light, still weighed as much as a large box of bricks, and we hauled it to the taxi and back into Chania.

After a terrific late lunch near the harbour, we walked around the sea wall to the lighthouse on Saturday which was a wonderful way to spend an hour. Beyond the wall, and to the east, the hills of Akrotiri rose up from the sea, and Zorba’s mountain (where the last scene of the movie was filmed on the hillside and the beach) was visible in the distance. Up on the sea wall, the view back towards the harbour was postcard-perfect. The still-snow-capped White Mountains rose up in the distance forming a majestic backdrop to the old city, with its interesting mix of Turkish minarets and church steeples, Venetian buildings, and the old fortifications. It was fairly quiet as the crowds of summer had not yet descended, and that unique so-bright sunshine of the Aegean sucked and teased that incredible shade of blue from the sea waters along the coast. We sighed that contented vacationer’s sigh that says: “We SO deserve this!” and smiled.

We returned to the hotel, unpacked our bags and organized for our early morning departure for the bus to the Samaria Gorge. As we laid our heads down we heard the distant sounds of the crowds coming in the open window from the harbour, carried on the breeze. After 33 hours travelling without sleep on the previous two days of travelling on Thursday and Friday, we had not yet fully caught up on our sleep, so we were conked out within seconds of hitting the pillow on Saturday evening. It is quite possible that the local Chania population strolling the harbour wondered about the strange buzzing chain-saw sounds coming from the west end of the old town as we snored ourselves into oblivion.

NEXT INSTALLMENT – Hiking the Samaria Gorge, 17 kilometers from 4000 feet all downhill, and four legs of Jello. Further explorations in Chania. A lesson in traditional Cretan knives and arm hair shaving. Fields of Daisies in the Air and Hidden Churches.

MarthaT

Loved your descriptive report. I will be in Greece next month at this time and this report reved up my excitement level.
Can't wait to hear about the gorge because I am thinking about that also.

Hana

Dave -

Excellent trip report! Had to laugh out loud at your bathroom categories.
Keep it coming - hubby and I leave for Greece next thursday - August 23rd and will be spending time in Chania, Heraklion, and Santorini (as well as other locales)!

TexasAggie

Love your trip report! I can't wait to read about the rest of your trip. DH and I visited Greece in 2006 (mainland) and fell in love with the country. The islands are high on our "future trip wish list".

nicegirl512

Can't wait to keep reading!

SeaUrchin

What a great report! Such fun to read and so informative. More please.

stanbr

Thanks for your trip report. I appreciate your humor. We were in Chania just about the same time you were.
Your description of the showers and people traveling with heavy bags are classic Greek adventures.

Having said that as an experienced Greek traveler I have developed a few basic rules to live by while in Greece.
The first one is in respect of luggage. On one of our trips we had two huge back packs and two small packs that could be strapped to our tummies. We took a week long side trip and because of weight restrictions on the small airplane we left the big backpacks in the hotel in Athens. That was a revelation to us. In a week we never missed any of the stuff we left behind. We now travel with the two small school sized backpacks. Greece is such a laid back place you really do not need a whole lot of changes of clothes.
We take three of everything, wear one set of clothes, have yesterdays in the wash and have one set for tomorrow. When you hit 50 and have wonkey knees this is the only way to go.

My second rule has to do with showers. It comes in four parts, first undress outside the bathroom. This is the one time it is entirely legitimate to leave your clothes in a heap on the floor. Second, remove the toilet paper as it is virtually useless after being soaked by wayward spray.
Third never allow anyone else in the bathroom while you are showering unless you both intentionally plan to scrub each other.
And lastly once you have the hot water flowing, soak yourself down, then turn the water off. Soap yourself and complete your ablutions, then turn the water back on for a rinse. The hot water trapped in the line will generally last long enough for you to get rinsed off and saves you from the dreaded cold water deluge at the end.

yipper

Great report. We just retruned from Crete ourselves. I posted a report in July. It was a great trip. Where is part 2?

Yipper

Toucan2

Great Report. I look forward to reading more.

Dee_Dee

What a sense of humor you have! I just love your writing style. I have been laughing out loud reading your report. The part about your wife's suitcase Parisian holiday smelling of gauiloises & pastis having a discussion with a ratty intellectual Louis Vuitton bag brought tears to my eyes. I leave next week for my first trip to Greece so I am finding your report most helpful, especially the shower types. Please keep your trip report installments coming. I eagerly await more information and your unique (and humorous) writing!

Jed

Enjoying your report. May I suggest that all the parts be posted on this thread so we can follow your trip easily.

lvktravel

ttt

janaturner

Love your report! I read the Greek shrug and bathing receptacle portions to my Greek boyfriend who thought the shrug comments were especially funny.

My mother went to Greece with us for the first time this year and the "bathing receptacles" had her very perplexed. She assumed there was some secret we didn't tell her because she kept soaking everything.

Looking forward to the rest of your report.

Jana

Heimdall

>>She assumed there was some secret we didn't tell her because she kept soaking everything.<<

Love that! The secret is to keep the shower nozzle pointed into the shower - easier said than done.

April

What a great report! I'm looking forward to the Folegandros part.

sheila

Well done and more, please.

littlejane

Excellent report Dave, love your style
Thanks

julia_t

How funny are your descriptions of Greek bathrooms and the Lab Rat Maze at CDG? Laughing out loud here.

And your report of Chania and Crete is really good and informative too. Love your style, more please...

Frozen_North_Dave

Hi Folks! Glad everyone enjoyed the first part - never sure how my wacky sense of humour might come across. The next installment should be up some time this week. I'll follow Jed's suggestion and add it right into this thread. It unfortunately may not be up in time for all those lucky people departing for Greece this week - have a great trip and lucky you! Cheers till later.

Dave