Today we are scheduled to arrive at noon in Heraklion, so we have our strategy down.  Normal morning activities, sit in The Cellars (the stupid SUPER expensive Mondavi – of all things – wine bar that has taken the place of the great After 5 o’clock Somewhere bar), read, blog, then get everything ready and head to the Garden café a little after 11 to secure a table on the pool deck and hope they open lunch early.  We know the drill!

All worked according to plan, we were done with lunch and waiting on the stair landing (where we aren’t supposed to be, but….what can we say?) when the ship is cleared.  Today we are actually the first people off the ship!  Ana, the sweet GR girl who is always outside at the gangway high fives us for our accomplishment.  There are so many great staff on this ship.  We are docked at a different pier than normal where you need to take a shuttle to the port entrance, but we have arrived early so the shuttles are not ready yet.  After a couple of minutes, the buses start up and off we go to the port entrance.

From there it’s a 15-minute walk to the Hertz office to pick up our car for our afternoon of ruins and wine tour.  Arriving at the office, Maria was manning the office – she is the lady who we returned the car to the last time we were here in June.  She is so happy we have returned and then she sees Ed was born in Ohio which begins a whole huge discussion of one of her clients from Ohio who always comes to the islands for weeks and rents her car from Maria.  It takes forever to finalize the paperwork, simply because we are talking so much!

Finally we are ready and she says she will walk us to the car (which is unusual, but I think it is because we were her last customer and she closed the office after us).  As we make our way down the main boulevard, she stops at a little store and proceeds to have a long discussion with the girls sitting outside.  One of the girls goes in and comes out with a box of Greek candy, which Maria proceeds to hand to us and tell us it is a present from Greece.  How sweet is that?  Everyone is so nice here.  Walking with Maria through the little back lanes (she takes a shortcut we would have never found to the parking lot), she greets everyone she sees – she knows everyone – and explains that is why she loves it here so much.  It is like a little town and everyone knows everyone and cares for everyone – we can definitely see that.

Arriving at the lot, we get our little Peugeot 108, make sure it has a full gas tank this time (it does!) and extricate it from the tightly parked lot.  Phew, don’t know how the lot lady attendant does it!  Off we go into the heavy afternoon traffic.  Wow – it’s a mess.  Oh, and while people on the street are really nice, the drivers aren’t!  We got into a left turn lane and needed to get over, and no one would let us! Ed decided to just be Greek and went straight in the left turn lane, eventually scooching over into the right lane.  It is crazy driving in the city, lanes are just a suggestion, scooters and motorcycles don’t use lanes, they just sidle up in between cars – bedlam!  Oh, and there is this one traffic light at an intersection under the National Road bridge that is so short it only allows 3 cars through at a time.  Yeah, bedlam!

Finally, we successfully navigate the pitfalls of Heraklion traffic and merge onto the highway which is blissfully not busy.  We’ll only be on here for a few kilometers, but it is heavenly to just drive without the craziness.  20 minutes later, after being directed by Google to the center of the town of Tylissos, not the archeological site, we eventually find signs that direct us to the site and easily get through the little town to the parking lot.

As promised, in all the things I read about this archeological site, it is empty of people. There are only 2 others here!  Nice!  The ruins are not as big as Knossos, but are supposedly just as important, being connected to the same time period – flourishing during the Minoan and Greco-Roman periods (2000-1700 BC).  Three houses have been excavated and date back to 1700 BC.  These so called “mansions” are from the prosperous families who lived in town, and other finds include frescoes and bronze figurines and other important relics – now housed (we think) in the archeological museum in town. 

You can really see the structure of the houses in the excavations.  The entrance portico with it’s 3 stone pillars (all these houses were 2 stories when they existed), the 24 rooms, large pottery vats, and stone stairways connect everything together.  There is a large round cistern attached to the furthest house, as well as a long interior hallway (that is partially covered by a wooden shed type structure, probably to protect the area from the rain and flooding.  It is fairly low lying here. 

It is great wandering around the different rooms and areas with no crowds and nothing to disturb you.  Plus, we see, for the first time ever, pomegranate trees!  There are tons dotting the property, and I so want to pick one to take along for snacks! But, I don’t dare – A) I don’t want to get into trouble, and B) I don’t want to run the risk of picking a bad pomegranate and making us both sick.  Thus, I wisely (if not sadly) leave the pomegranates alone on their branches!  But they do make great photo opportunities.

Along with our tickets, we are given a book “to help with information – bring back at end” the ticket guy says.  Nice.  It is actually a great little book that provides far too much information to absorb in a short little time – all about the ruins, about Tylissos the town, the excavation and archeologist who managed it – but the best is the first picture in the book:  It’s a Tylisian Old Man, which I think is the cutest thing ever and considered buying the book just for that!  Resisting the urge, we instead take a picture to remind us of our time here.

Our next stop on the Cathy wine tour is a winery about 25 minutes away.  There are 3 wineries I’ve identified that create a big loop, circling us back to Heraklion.  Thus begins the adventure.  F’ing Google maps.  We start off out of Tylissos fine, but that all ends about 10 minutes into our drive when the GPS directs us through a little town (God knows which one, we never could figure it out) with streets that are so narrow we have to pull the sideview mirrors in just to make it through – and then with less than an inch to spare.  Oh my God!  Ed is ABSOLUTELY the #1 driver of the world!!!  There is no way a car bigger than ours could have ever made it through those little streets – we’re now wondering if we were even supposed to be driving there.  But you know GPS – and we should too by now.  Honestly!  If only we had pictures – but we were too focused on getting out of there without scraping the car against the stone walls to even think about taking a picture.  It is the only time in our lives that we wished we had a GoPro with us to record this adventure!

From here, the adventure only gets more interesting, so to speak.  Following the GPS because, of course, we have no other choice, we end up on these little narrow, semi-paved lanes that run through the steep countryside.  The vistas are amazing – looking out over vineyards and olive groves – but the roads are not.  We keep going deeper and deeper into the vineyards on smaller and smaller farm roads. 

It was crazy – and while we love the scenery, we are not loving the roads!  We stopped the car and walked the road a bit to scout out where it went and luckily found an area where we could turn the car around (the roads/paths were that narrow).  Parked the car there too and I ran ahead to see where the path went because the damn GPS kept saying the winery was 3 minutes away.  But the track narrowed, got even more bumpier and rockier – oh, with grass growing up between the two tracks, plus it wound around a corner and up a hill – we called Uncle.

Ed, #1 driver, successfully did a 3 point turn, and reversed course.  Somewhere along the line we lost cell phone data – $#!T!  Which just meant we had to keep the GPS on with the winery as the destination in order to at least see the roads/paths/tracks that existed. We managed to navigate our way back to the teeny lane village we barely made it through and thankfully found a lane that went around the village (we WERE NOT doing that again). Of course the damn GPS kept trying to get us to turn around and go back to the winery.

Finally data returned and we were able to plug in Heraklion – because at this point?  There ain’t no wineries in our future!  We were lucky to get out of the tight spots we were in and all we want to do is go back into town, walk around a bit and have a much deserved drink!

Now we are finally on paved roads, which are good and fine.  The scenery is still amazing, and there isn’t anyone else around which allows us to stop and take photos as much as we want. We only hit one snag in some little village where we had to navigate around a church and pull our mirrors in again.  Sigh.  But finally the damn GPS puts us on the one of the main state roads and we make it back to Heraklion without further incident.

Quite an accomplishment considering where we were 30 minutes previous!

Back at the car park, we spend 15 minutes chatting with the lovely lot attendant who is amazed we’ve been here so many times and wants to know all about the cruise and where else we have been and when we are coming back.  She tells us that when we come back she will give us the name and directions to an old traditional coffee shop that we will love.  Telling us it is the best and we must see it. Deal! She’s darling – but everyone here is!

Now it is meandering time. Up through the old town, past the Church of Agios Titos, which looks more like a stately governmental building, past the Venetian Loggia and on to Morosini Lions Fountain in the main square.  Here we plop down at one of the many cafes around the square for a refreshing – and needed – beer and wine, along with a cheese pie (you know we are not going to miss a day in Greece without a cheese pie) and potato chips that come with the drinks.  Sigh.  Nice.

Then it is back to the ship, where as we are walking down the street just getting ready to turn into the port area proper, one of our shuttle buses is pulling out.  Thinking we’ll have to wait for the next one, darn it, but no. The driver looks over, points to the sign, we nod and he stops for us!  We are so impressed. 

So, even though today might have been a bust in terms of wineries, it was amazing and fun, the scenery was fabulous and the people here were amazingly wonderful. In the end, a win-win all the way around!