May 9, 2025

May 9, 2025

With our travel days behind us, Aimee and I finally got a good night’s sleep. We woke refreshed and had the hotel buffet breakfast. Aimee had Greek yogurt and said it was some of the best. I had a delicious ham casserole along with several desserts, just like we found common in Sicily. I especially liked the Portokalopita or Orange Cake.

We then took a long walk along the old port and out to the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater. I got waylaid on the way by a young girl enlisting me as her photographer. Based on her crazy poses, she must be a frequent travel social media poster.

I was unhappy to see a cruise ship docked just outside with tender ships ferrying a continuous line of tourists ashore. Thinking the ship looked familiar, I googled it and found it to be a twin of the Renaissance Cruise ship that we took around Tahiti twenty-five years ago.

This Venetian port has more than a dozen stone barrel-roofed shipyards on its perimeter built to maintain their fleet of oared trading vessels. One now contains the Maritime Museum of Crete. This small museum surprisingly has nothing about the Venetian Era. It does however have a replica ship of the much earlier Minoan Culture. This Bronze Age society was the first trading empire of the eastern Mediterranean. Crete was their capital. From this central location they could row their ships to the land-based empires on the surrounding mainland.

For lunch we chose to walk west to the Nea Chora (New Town) marina. We shared a salad, baked Sea Bass, and a traditional Cretan Boureki casserole. It was all very good.

On the walk back to the hotel Aimee and I made a brief stop at the Firkas Fortress that guarded the opposite end of the lighthouse breakwater. Back at the hotel I read the news about the newly elected American pope.

For dinner we ate at a nice restaurant on the port. Besides salad and very tender calamari, we had Cacio e Pepe (Cheese and Peppercorn Pasta) for the first time. For dessert it was a slice of Mosaiko, a very chocolaty roll.

Afterwards we strolled through the narrow lanes of this cute town again window shopping along the way.

We went looking for Gelato but only found this "roll" ice cream shop. It was a new experience. They mixed the ingredients and "churned" the ice cream on a refrigerated steel plate and then scraped and rolled the result. It was fascinating to watch and very decadent.