Greece!

We’ve spent the last ten glorious days in Greece. We were fortunate to have my high school friend Meredith visit us in Europe over Thanksgiving break. When she asked where she should meet us I looked at a map and found the farthest place south we could get while still being in Europe. That happened to be Crete, Greece. My hopes were that it would still be warm and we could spend our time on the beach. Unfortunately it wasn’t warm enough for that but we did have pleasant weather. We met Mere in the Athens airport on Thanksgiving Day and flew together to Chania where we rented a cottage in the old town near the old harbor. We had 3 full days with Mere where we walked the cobble stone streets, had a lot of delicious food to eat and went sailing on the Cretan Sea.



Lucas is helping Skipper pull up the sail

Mere helping with another sail

We all took turns driving the boat

Lucas and I decided to stay in Chania after Mere left. We down graded to a very cheap hotel (11 euro a night) that turned out to be much nicer than we expected. We had a view of the sea and old harbor out our window. We spent most of our time the next five days walking the beaches and spending the evenings sitting out on the pier by the lighthouse. We had the lights and hum of the city in front of us and the ocean breeze with waves crashing behind. The first night we discovered the peace of the pier it was a surprisingly warm night. We were drawn back every evening thereafter. We did have the opportunity to go swimming once. It was chilly but we weren’t the only crazies out there!



Enjoying the sea and sun on one of our many beach walks

The view out our window & our favorite place to sit at night

Our view of the city while sitting on the above wall. There was a full moon this night.

We met some locals we connected with that gave us their opinions and knowledge of the current crisis in Greece. Something we love about staying in peoples homes is we get to hear much more about culture and politics than you do being a tourist. Finding this lovely family to talk with made our vacation special. Also, it’s nice to talk with someone other than each other. Believe it or not Lucas and I do run out of things to talk about. Spiro offered to take us to a near by Monk Monastery where they have a stone walking trail down a mountain towards the sea. We went into a few caves on the way down and also saw some 500 year old ruins where the monks went to hide when the Turkish occupied Crete. They built a whole village down in a valley where they were hidden. This was awesome to see. The sun came out bright and hot right when it was time to walk back up the mountain to the car. We are very appreciative of him for taking us there. It’s something we couldn't have done on our own.



The stone path we walked built by the Monks

The ruins we hiked to

This is a church built into the side of the mountain where there was already a cave.





It was hard saying goodbye to Crete. It’s by far our favorite place we’ve been so far. In my opinion it was far more beautiful, had friendlier people and was much more affordable than anywhere we’ve been in Europe.



One of the caves we went into on our hike