Alas another closed castle

 We wok up early with high hopes before getting a message from George he was canceling the hike for bad weather.  There was actually a chance for rain in the afternoon, but this morning it was just cloudy.  I was not going to argue with George.  He had been working in his olive grove the day before for many hours and was probably pretty tired.  Instead of saying so he blamed it on the weather.  It’s fine.  It did wind up driving down the hotel to say goodbye and gave us some wild oregano and sea salt from the sea.  It was very. Nice and we will miss the shit out of him.  But all things come to an end, so we packed up our shit and left our future home.

The road to Sitia is a long one, perhaps 4 hours or so, so we planned a few stops in between.  The first step lead us off the highway and into the wilds of central Crete.  These are my favorite roads to drive on, the highway across the north half of Crete is mostly a bunch of rental cars jockeying for position, and passing each other on hairpin turns.  The back roads of Crete are much to sparse for such things and we can sometimes go many miles without seeing another car.

Destination 1 was the Melidoni Cave, a place I had on a list a few years back when I was planning the cave tour of Crete.  Melidoni is an industrial city filled with giant factories belching smoke into the air, and the smells of olives and smoke is over whelming.  Up a hill overlooking the city sits the Melidoni Cave where 300 people were asphyxiated by the Turks in 1823.  Its a smallish gallery with giant stalactites hanging in from a very large ceiling.  The cave itself is very small, or at least the parts they let the public view.  I didnt really see anything about the actual size of the cave or how much it had been explored.  Just the bit about all the people that died there trying to hide from the Turks.  Very tragic indeed.

From Melidoni we headed further up into the mountains to Anogia, a place we”ve been a few times on our way up the Ideon Andron cave.  The place has a couple fantastic family run grill houses and the one we wanted to go to had a bus parked in from a 50 French or German or some shit old people inside. Not wanted to wait we went to the other place and got seated immediately and our order taken.  The outside area over looked the city and the air was gorgeous.  I had a plate of lamb and JW had her Greek salad and all was well with the world.

From Anogia we headed towards Heraklion and the highway, vowing to stop if we saw any brown signs.  There was one that lead to a Minoan summer home but it was closed, so on we went, twisting and turning and loving every vista we came over and all the sites of the island.

Once we reached the city we hopped on the highway and headed towards our final destination of Sitia.  It was the normal jockeying for position, small cars driving like Indy 500, most of them falling behind when the resort areas of Malia were reached.  When we got to Agios Nicholas we decided to stop at the Cretan Olive Oil Farm and shop a bit and take a bit of break.  We bought you guys stuff.

We then headed back on the highway and eventually arrived at Sitia and checked into our hotel the Itanos.  We took a little walk around town and found out our restaurant of choice was shuttered up, so we just randomly picked a place and it was fine, not great.  At one point there was a large fish just off the pier fighting or fucking another fish, hard to tell, but it drew the attraction of many people and the iPhones came out, news at 11.

We finished the dinner, strolled a bit along the promenade and then came back for drinks, orange cake and nice nap.  Tomorrow we hike the gorge of the dead, our first destination in Greece back in 2013.