Weiserman: Warm and Lovely Crete

Our second series of “childhood disease” shots is due on March 11, and, at first we thought we would move to the Peloponnese for the month, but luckily we found a campsite on Crete that was opened and decided to take the overnight ferry there.

The ferry lest at 9:00 pm and arrived on the island at 6:030 am. What a terrible night trying to sleep in airplane like chairs in a fully lighted room with a TV blasting!!! I swear that on the way back we will sleep in Yertle even if the rules say that no one can stay on the car decks!!

However….as bad as the ferry ride was, this island has made it worth it. Our campground is RIGHT

on the beach

The island is the home of the ancient Myceneans and there are many, many significant ruins of palaces and towns all over the place. It does seem that wherever there is current habitation, someone 3000 years ago lived there too! Olive trees, orange trees, lemon trees, goats all carrying lovely tinkling bells, mountains zooming straight down to the blue sea and rocks, rocks rocks. The Venetians were here two and there are several towns which clearly show their influence in the architecture. Then there were the Byzantines who converted the people to Christianity and left small, jewel-like churches all over the place. Even today, little, tiny churches are dotting the mountains.

Crete is the home of Knossos, the great palace of the Myceneans which has, unfortunately I think, been rather garishly restored in an attempt to let us see what it must have been like. Not all of it has been painted so brightly, though

The Lasithos plateau which is a large, cultivated area high up in the mountains has the remains of many windmills, used, as this one was, for grinding wheat, as well as many used for irrigation.

We also visited a very strange museum of Homo Sapiens which was unfortunately closed but looked very quirky. Apparently one man chose to trace the development of man from the cave to space.

The Laws of Gornia are truly unique and constitute the first writings of law ever found. A whole wall of Doric script detailing the law of the land.

Greel mythology is alive and well here as well and we visited the cave where Zeus was born.

After a long hike up a stone strewn mountain (in the summer you can take a donkey) we came to this dimly lit cave that had a series of stairs that went down and down and down. We were the only ones there and I kept thinking that you would never find anything so spooky, dimly lit and mildly dangerous in the U.S. It was quite beautiful. The trade-off for visiting the island on the off-season is that we had all of the sites to ourselves, but on the other hand, doe sites were closed and most of the stores were closed. We also found that all the sites and all the stores closed year round at 3:00 pm which made for very early mornings.

We visited a number of very interesting towns and palaces, many of which looked like rubble strewn hillsides or barely visible structures. However, after seeing so many it was easy to feel the presence of the ages and we went to every one that was open and accessible!

We went to a beach which was lined with caves which, in the early 60's had hippies living in them. Now they are closed at night but I can see the appeal!

One of our favorite towns was Hania or Chania (there are several different spellings of each town and all have both Greek and Roman alphabets…very confusing.) Much Venetian influence. Narrow, winding streets, beautiful harbor, and an old 16th century synagogue that is still functioning. We went there are a 30ish man took us around. He had an American accent and told us he had been born on Crete but educated in the U.S. When I mentioned that it was quite serendipity that he was able to come back home as a trained rabbi to run a synagogue on crete he told us that he was not a rabbi and wasn't even Jewish, but felt a historic affinity to the place! They still have services every Friday even though there are only 8 Jews; non-jews who feel as he does come there too.

Notie that Crete has turned me blond!

The signage on the road is a bit perplexing arriving and disappearing seemingly at whim. However, one day we took at turn at a sign "Ancient Olive tree" and followed an every degrading road up and up and winding around hairpin turns almost to the top of the mountain to find a 3250 year old tree!!!!

Alive and healthy!

The same day we had a picnic on a real palm beach,

The food is great with land snails a common dish (we can see them crawling around in various places), grilled pork and lamb, and lots of olive oil and lemon drizzled on everything.

Our first day at the campground we met a woman who seems to live here and an American man who had been living in Czech and we had two pot-luck dinners with them. Great fun. And Paul went with us on some of our excursions.

This has been a wonderful month and has emphasized how important it is to us that we have warm weather and the ability to live outside of Yertle.

Carnival is the day before lent and Rethymon, one of the

ne of the larger towns has the best festival. It is like a Mummer's Day parade without the live music: that is many different clubs and groups get together all wearing the same costume, with or without a big float accompanying them. There are many, many loudspeakers set up on poles and plays all the afternoon while the groups are marching. The first groups are quite orderly, but by late afternoon the ending groups are staggering downy he street. However, everyone is very jolly and it was lots of fun.