lost and then found: a tale of two palaces

this morning we didnt wake so good, too much retsina, too much snoring, a hard bed and a soft pillow.  oh well, we were out of the hotel by8 and hopped down the road to the palace of knossos, which at 8:30 in the morning was already full of fucking tourists.  we managed to avoid most of them and got a very good look at some incredible minoan stuff.  the downfall of this particular one being some asshat named evans decided to remod the place back in1920 and by doing so it completely impossible to know if what we were seeing was ancient or merely old.

anyways then we got on the road for the south of crete, my directions sucked and at one point a blind choice led us exactly to where we needed to be and then a short time later we were lost again.  wewere saved by agios thomas and a random road sign to some little village and before we knew it we were pulling into the parking lot of gortyns, a mostly roman ste, but with some pretty cool stuff.

then just down the road was our second minoan palace of the day festos, which perched high on a hilltop overlooking a gorgeous farmland plain below.  this was much better than knossos in our opionion and e ruins were mostly untouched by english asshats.  also not so many tourists.  it was amazing to be walking on the pathways build in 1700 bc, touching the walls and imagining what it might have looked like all those years ago.

distances being what they were on crete we decided to skip agia triada and drove down to matala beach for lunch instead.  it's basically this super famous hippy beach which these roman caves built into the clif walls that they used to bury people in.  the place didnt have a whole lot of hippies, but the caves were crawling with russians. we then picked the #2 place to eat according to trip advisor called sirtaki.  i had a swordfish fillet grilled and julia had an eggplant stew or something.  after lunch we went.  down to the beech and thereby completing three for four shores on the island.  not bad.  weknew we wouldnt make it to agia triada before they closed so decided to head down to the nearby kommos beach which had some minoan ruins not open to the public.  we could see it through the fence and it was pretty small but pretty cool as well.  then we drove back to heraklion on the correct road and it took an hour.  sucks.  resting up for the night and in the morning we hop on our first ferry ride to santorini.  jealous much?