Penthouse Please!😊
Last evening, we went in search of a specific restaurant. Annemarie had read about an apparently decent place that was located away from the tourist zone. So we walked over there in the dark and again had a little navigational issue with Google Maps. I’ve come to conclude that it’s this town particularly. It couldn’t be a user error, right?😅
The food was indeed very good, and the place was nice enough, but pretty straightforward. The people that ran the restaurant were very nice
Today we travelled to the north coast as we slowly complete our circuit around Crete.
I’d recently done a little reading about places to enjoy in the Agios Nikolaos area, and one place that was mentions was the turquoise waters at Voulisma Beach. They weren’t lying…
From there we drove almost up to our destination, and then headed west inland to a small town called Kritsa. The town is well known for its local artisans so we decided to drive up for a look see.
Leaving the town, Google Maps decided to take us on another wild goose chase. This time through various dirt roads that are used to service the olive trees. It was a bit frustrating. with large potholes full of water. I was a bit concerned about damaging the car, but eventually we made it out to the church that we had targeted.
Across the road from the church, we found a small taverna where we stopped for a cold drink and a couple of appies. It was getting close to lunchtime.
We eventually arrived at our destination to find that there were two cruise ships in port. This is apparently a little unusual, and the result was that the port parking was unavailable as the two ships were serviced. The port area was a bit insane with lots of cruisers walking around. and heavy traffic everywhere. I guess because the port parking was not available, everyone was looking for whatever space they could find for their car. Sort of in the middle of nowhere, we found a place to park our car. The spot looked OK, so we left it there.
We walked to our nearby hotel which we had booked just yesterday morning. It’s a nice little boutique hotel. and we have one of three penthouse rooms. Anyone who knows our travel style can appreciate that this is out of character for us. However, we received a $600 discount for the two nights because this is the end of season on Crete and the hotels have slashed prices quite significantly.  So we decided, why not?😎
We were able to check in early at about 13:30 this afternoon. They kindly told us that our room would be cleaned early, so that it would be available for us, given our shortish travel day.
We could see that there was a nice boardwalk along the shore, and decided to stretch our legs because the forecast rained for today. has not shown up. Lucky us!
We visited the central Greek Orthodox Church this afternoon because we won’t likely be able to get into it tomorrow. It’s very different from more traditional European churches, and this one has quite brilliant frescos.
Tomorrow should be quite interesting. We hope to be able to see something of the activities. I will share our findings here tomorrow.
So far we really like what we’ve seen of Agios Nikolaos. It’s the third largest city on Crete and we only have Iraklion to visit in a couple of days to have had a good look at the 5 main centres on Crete.
That’s about it for today. We have been directed by the hotel staff to a couple of less touristy restaurants. We shall see what we find!
Cheers!
Geoff🍷
