It's either Pavaroti or The Ramones

Howdy folks, it's been a while. I'm on Kasos now but this post won't cover that yet, since I have to catch you all up on Crete.

Our first night in Crete was in a town called Chania. Our B&B was right on the old Venetian port with a view of the old mosque and the lighthouse. And right on top of eateries and cafes and various other nightlife spots. We made it there on the Flying Cat, a pretty cool catamaran sort of vessel that skimmed the water's surface at breakneck pace. The trip from Santorini to Herakleion usually takes 6 hours. This little beaut' got us there in 2! I was impressed with it but I was also a little sad as I love to sit out on the deck of the usual slow boat and watch the water go by and the boat's approach to whatever island it's reaching. Nevertheless, it's certainly a time-saver and as we'd cut our stay in Crete short, this was a good thing. We just made the bus from Herakleion to Chania and we settled in for the 2.5 hour trip. As we were late departing Santorini, we were naturally late arriving in Chania. No big deal, one might think. Well, not quite. My dad seems to feel that whenever I'm in Europe, he needs to be aware of where I am all times so as to offer assistance should it be needed. Very sweet, yes. In this case, the hostelier apparently got concerned when we didn't arrive right at 11 PM, which I had told her we would, and called my dad to see if I had called. Though my dad wasn't particularly concerned about it, I got a tongue lashing from said hostelier about how "if people are going to be late, a phone call is a good idea so that other people don't worry about their whereabouts". Great.

In any case, we got it all worked out, we settled into our room, I called my dad, OK, OK. No sooner do we settle than we realize our B&B is sitting on top of a karaoke bar. Oh, joy! We were seranaded with Elvis Presley, with Wham, with ABBA, if I recall correctly and Ace of Base. SWEET. As we were finally getting rid of the giggles and letting exhaustion and heat take over, I heard a piece I thought I recognized. At first I thought it was one of those modern Italian quasi-operatic sapptacular ballads. But then I wasn't quite sure. I finally determined that it was supposed to be either Pavarotti or The Ramones. And there you have it.

Crete is something of a blur. We went to the lovely beach at Falassarna and then onto another bus to take us to Rethymnon. We intended to stay at the youth hostel there, which came at a very good price, but decided that we were a little old for that so we found some lovely little rooms in the old city instead.
Rethymnon is one of my favorite places (the old city) so I was glad to share it with my friends. Then off to Knossos. It turns out that this particular palace is in Herakleion, rather than Rethymnon. Who knew... My dad nearly disowned me when I told him that I had temporarily lost my senses and told the rest of the party that Knossos was near Rethymnon. Your dad's an archeologist, suuuure he is.

So more or less that was the end of the first phase of the trip. C and N headed off to Athens on the 7th for the return trip. I caught the bus to Sitia at the last minute and from there, on the 8th, flew in to Kasos.

I'm working on getting some of my pix uploaded here, but the returning parties will be posting stuff as soon as they get themselves settled. By my next post I'll hopefully have a friendly understanding with the crew here and get some special favors for computer access. Apparently, my dad's been here too.