Damn You Google Maps!
As I left my journal yesterday I was talking about the weather change coming our way. Well, it arrived. It rained most of the night and all morning. That was ok with us. We had a nice breakfast in the apartment as we continue to use up our small supply of groceries. The tea I brought from home has been a good idea as most places we stay don’t provide tea, or if they do it’s usually really poor quality. There seems to always be coffee, but Annemarie seems to go out most days to find a latte as she claims that Greek coffee is crap! 😳
We managed to figure out the washing machine and with the laundry finally done and hung outside we turned to planning the rest of our stay on Crete. Another 4-5 days. The weather is a bit iffy and we decided that the quality of many of the roads we would have to drive would make things potentially a bit dicey. The plan now is to leave here tomorrow morning and work our way back up to the north shore. We booked a very nice hotel in Agio Nikolaos and because this is the very end of the season we found a luxury boutique hotel for cheap with $600 off the room rate for a two night stay! We will then drop the car a bit ahead of schedule at the Iraklion airport on Thursday and we’ve booked a nice apartment in the old town for two nights. There seems to be enough there to do including a couple of museums that I’d like to see. This way we don’t have a risk of missing out Saturday morning flight to Athens because of heavy rain.
We feel that our two visits to Crete have accomplished what we were hoping for.
So back to yesterday’s fun. After a nice breakfast on our veranda courtesy of our kind host we packed up our gear and went downstairs to settle up. We were told that he was at church. Oh yah, it’s Sunday. So we sat and waited for him. Not for too long. We paid a very reasonable bill and set off to drive along the coast to Ierapetra. Some looking at Google Maps and our physical map indicated that we could mostly follow the coast road which was clearly a yellow road.
We set off along the coast heading east. It was a beautiful day, but we could see that the initial hints of poor weather were just hanging inland and keeping pretty much off the coast.
The roads were at times adequate and at other times just a single lane, clearly following routes that had been here for centuries. They were often very windy and in poor repair, particularly when they were right on the water. The recent storms had ripped up these sections quite badly. And yet they were still passible, though might not be on stormy days.
We stopped frequently to take photos, or at least I did.😅 We once stopped high on a bluff to check out the views, and at one point there was a beautiful older traditional church.
It was a simple coastal village with only one waterfront café open on a Sunday morning, and it was busy!
We figured that most of the small towns go to church on Sunday morning then gather at the local tavernas for coffee before heading home for family dinner gatherings. We stopped just before 12:00 and seating was hard to come by, but we managed to fit in ok. We just sat there watching the villagers connect and wondered at hierarchies and community structures. There were lots of kids playing and it was clear that there were many young families in the community. A healthy balance of ages that’s not always present in many smaller villages in the EU where it’s often only the elderly who are left when the younger generations leave to find education and work in the cities. I realized that the extremely intensified greenhouse agriculture was probably holding families here. And there was lots of it. I wondered at the damage to this ancient land. Of course, it’s places like this that provide much of the vegetables and fruits to the rest of the EU in the winter as well as employment. I’ve seen them in Spain, southern coastal France, Portugal, Italy, southern Croatia and along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.
It was leaving the village that we experienced our first real navigation challenge. We knew that we had to climb over a high bluff to continue along the coast, but when Google Maps led us high and onto a single tract dirt road we knew that Google Maps had led us astray. Clearly this wasn’t what was intended.
Several eight point turns later (and a very uncomfortable Annemarie who was sitting cliff side in the car) we decided to make our way carefully back down to the coast. We finally made it down ok. And passing the taverna where we’d stopped earlier I figured that the older Greek men sitting there were chuckling as they passed across small denomination euros depending on which way they’d bet on our success or failure!😅
We asked ourselves how this situation with the unnavigable road had happened? Thanks Google Maps you do and so!🤬 What a mess. Also the narrow winding multiple switchback roads had really messed up Google’s navigation bot as well with some interesting instructions being constantly chirped at us! “Go right!” right along a high cliff with a significant drop to the right. Fortunately, I’m not a good listener at times, and this paid off handsomely in those moments.🥳
It turned out that our only option was to climb steeply away from the coast and into the mountains so that we could join up with a principle red road and work our way back down to the coast at Mirtos and then again along the coast to Ierapetra.
Annemarie didn’t particularly enjoy the climb up the narrow road away from the sea, but it was clearly a fun drive for me. The benefits of a standard car clearly stand out in these situations. First and second gears all the way up.🙂
We finally made it into Ierapetra in one piece. However, Google Maps wasn’t quite finished with us yet! We used it to navigate to our apartment and it took us all over the place. We had checked our app settings after the unfortunate incident earlier in the day and everything was set up correctly. I think that all the one-way streets in Ierapetra just overwhelmed the app. It took us all over the place! It was hilarious and we turned it off and on to reset it. Somehow we found our way to our place and with two hours until we could access the apartment we went in search of lunch. A shared pizza and a walk and we were back into a good place again.
We enjoyed a nice dinner and went for a good walk afterwards. It had been a good day despite Google Maps’ bad day. we all have them from time to time…
This afternoon;
The sun came out at noon today and the rain disappeared until later tonight.
a plate with large chunks of fish and a half lime is presented. Then you inspect and break up the fish before adding it to the soup base. Voilà, fish soup! A very nice lunch!
And this brings me to the end of our travel down here and our simple day today. It’s been a very good travel so far and with a good week to go we should still be able to enjoy ourselves!
Cheers!
Geoff☀️😎
