Fri, 04/04/25    Chania, Crete

Day 89 - Friday, April 4th, 2025 – Chania, Crete

This is our second visit to Crete. We met our tour guide, Eleftheria and driver, Lestheris at the cruise terminal. We did our introductions; got in the van and we're on our way. Our first stop was way up in the mountains. We went up here for the picturesque views. This was one of those places where you could see forever. There was an old Fort up there too which we looked at, but the views were the reason we went up there. I will let the pictures do most of the talking. We were up there for about an hour period the weather was perfect.

From there we drove a ways down to an olive mill. This is exactly how it sounds. They mill the olives into olive oil. It reminds me of one of those shows on cable With a name like “How do you do it?” For the first 45 minutes or so we got a first-hand tour of the process. They were not actually processing olives at the time. The season starts in September. We just missed the end of it. Nonetheless, we were able to see the equipment and the overall process. We learned that there are 35,000,000 olive trees on Crete. Many of them are hundreds of years old. There are a couple in the pictures that are supposed to be 1000 years old. After the factory tour, we went inside the store where they had a tasting. They only have one olive oil, but we were able to try it with bread alone then bread with lemon and salt. It was an interesting combination. Then they have these olives that were salt cured to the size of about a pea. They're black. They are very intense flavored olives. I bought a small container of them. I'll have to bring them home. They also have locally made honey. So, we tried some of that. On top of it all, there was a sweet liquor that we tried. And then there was a full out ouzo that we tried. Thankfully these were just small shot glasses Then, of course, came the shopping. We didn't buy too much I don't think. Of course, we bought olive oil. Before we left, we took a lot of pictures. This was one of my favorite visits. We got to see the process from end to end. The tour guide was obviously very knowledgeable. It was a good visit.

As we traveled down the roads, we kept seeing these little churches along the side of the road. We asked the tour guide, and she explained that they are put in the places where good things or bad things happened. They are similar to the crosses we see on the side of the road where most likely an accident occurred and there was a death involved. The interesting thing was that she said that near misses are considered good things and there may be a church for that also. I don't know if we got a picture of one, but they are probably two to three feet tall. Simply put, they're noticeable. They're many of them on the road.

We drove down to the market. As with most markets, it was huge. There was every kind of store imaginable. We picked up the T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and postcards. We had plenty of choices for lunch, but we decided to go to a place that makes gyros. We wanted to see if the gyros on Crete were better than the ones we had in Athens. I will say they were very good. They were not as good as the ones in Chicago, but they were good. These were straight pork again. They didn't have that veal pork mix that we're used to in Chicago. The gyros were huge. Because we also had bruschetta we had a lot of food in front of us. We decided to give one of the gyros to the tour guide. It may have actually ended up with the driver because he didn't eat with us. The bruschetta was pretty good. They didn't use balsamic vinegar, so it missed that taste we are used to again. I had beer. We sat in the sun. It was a nice visit. It was in an open area where you could see hundreds of people wandering by. It was a perfect spot to spend an afternoon, but we didn't have that kind of time. We made our way back up through the market towards the van.

At the cruise terminal, we said our goodbyes. It was another very nice excursion. They went their way and we went ours.

We made it back to the cabin where we rested for a couple of hours. We got dressed and went to dinner. Mary had pasta of some sort for her appetizer. She had chicken cordon blue for her entree. I had corn and crab chowder, salad and spaghetti with a meatball. It was one huge meatball. We both had blueberry sorbet for dessert. It was a nice dinner. We didn't want to eat too much because we had the big gyro earlier.

We decided to go to the show because there was a guitarist. Anything with a guitar interests me. This guy was good. I tried to include a couple of videos in the pictures area. He did not play any music that we knew, but his guitar work was amazing. Hopefully, the videos will show what I mean. Again, it was something that we were familiar with, but it was done differently. Expanding our horizons 😊

It had been on another full day, so we went back up to the cabin and called it a day. Thankfully, tomorrow is an At Sea day.