Heraklion, Crete
The trip started at an early 3:30am. My grandmother has Plaka, meaning she is full of life and energy and if you meet her you can see she is very young at heart. We picked up a cab and headed to the airport to head to Heraklion, Crete.
When we arrived, after the short flight, we found out that the car rental place that we reserved was empty…no one around….so we headed via cab to Castello City Hotels, http://www.castellocity.com.
The room was very nice and clean, and we are around the corner from an awesome little food place that gives generous portions and a cab stop that helped immensely with getting to and fro to the various museums.
We even took the time to walk around the city which has a lovely path of shops, coffee houses and historic sites. A few of the most beautifully adorned churches I have ever seen, one converted to a museum and another into an art gallery!
Before heading to Knossos we hit the Archeological museum the day before, which I suggest so you can get the story and see an awesome wooden model of the original layout and structure.
The cab ride was short and even though we couldn’t see much of the underground labyrinth due to renovations we still enjoyed walk my all around and seeing how amazing not only the grounds were but the efforts of the restoration and excavation have been.
After we headed to the Crete Museum which showed a bit of history covering churches, war, rural life and a lovely tribute to Nikos Kazantzakis the author of Zorba the Greek and his prolific writing and collection.
After all that we were starving and ate and a restaurant called “λίγο κρασί, λίγο θάλασσα” (a little wine, a little ocean) http://www.ligokrasiligothalassa.gr. The food was super duper tasty and at the end of the meal they have us a big complimentary spread including a little bottle of Raki…basically Greek moonshine. We strolled casually back to hotel and had coffee on the rooftop, a wonderful end to Heraklion and now off to Rethymno!
