Rhodes, Crete and Santorini
Yesterday was the day we got to spend on Rhodes, and it was fantastic! If you want to go shopping in Greece, go to Rhodes! The prices are pretty great. Thusly we were shopping for most of the day, except for the morning when we went to the Palace of the Grand Master (or Kastello) which is a huge medieval castle with great big marble staircases and frescoes and statues and even what looked like a dungeon! We were told it was Mussolini’s summer house, but soon it will be my summer house because I intend on buying it when I become filthy stinking rich!
After shopping and about an hour before we were to be back on the ship, Selby, Rachel, Scott and I went to the beach for awhile. The three of them went swimming but the ocean was too cold for me!
For dinner that evening it was the Captain’s ball so we all got dressed up and Selby did our make-up. It was fun! The dinner itself was not much different except that for dessert they turned out the lights and set the baked Alaska on fire. Opa!
Back in the cabins, Selby made a name tag for Jeremy that said ‘The Protector’ on the back of a gravol box. (His job in the horde is to protect us girls!) It is funny because when it gets flipped around, it has the gravol picture. In such a case, he is known as ‘anti-nauseant man’!
As it got later the boat began rocking violently again, making it impossible to walk a straight line. Time for bed at that point!
This morning we’d arrived at the port of Heraklion in Crete, where we were whisked off after breakfast into another tour bus. The guy had an odd inflection in his voice that I didn’t notice too much but it drove Selby crazy with anger! (Fun to watch!)
On Crete we were able to look around the palace of Knossos where we learned a little about the ancient Minoan culture and of their strange sudden disappearance. This palace was also interesting because it is the place assumed to be the labyrinth where the Minotaur lived. Cool stuff! Our tour guide for this place was so obsessed with the words ‘preserved’ and ‘reconstructed’ that Gill actually started counting the amount of times she said them! After going to the Minoan museum, we did yet even more shopping in Heraklion and then boarded the cruise ship again.
Eating lunch, I realized that I am soo tired of signature cruise music, it is absolutely annoying! Arrhhg!
Later on we disembarked, again by tenders, to Santorini. I was a bit nervous about this island because the idea was to ride donkeys to the entrance of the town. Mostly, people just rode donkeys on their own but for some reason my donkey was tied to another one, which was ridden by one of the owners. I was happy about that though, because it meant that I didn’t have to steer or anything! It took awhile to get to the top, so we didn’t have a whole lot of time on Santorini. We did a bit of shopping of course but we more or less just looked around—it was a very pretty island.
When it was time to go, I was with Alex and we were somewhat separated from the rest of the group. We decided it would be best to take the gondola down to the tenders, since we were a bit pressed for time and we’d heard that riding the donkeys down was rather treacherous. There was only one problem: we could not find the gondola station! We looked everywhere, climbing the steep paths to try and reach the top where we figured the station would have to be. After searching to no avail, we determined that we would walk to the restaurant we saw nearby and ask for directions. Just then, someone else who was on our cruise said, “are you guys looking for the gondola station? It’s right there—” and pointed to the well-marked and very obvious set of doors we were standing, literally, right in front of.
We felt very stupid as we rode down to the boats!
Since eating dinner in the lower dining room made most of us sea sick, we ate on deck tonight, as the sun set on Santorini. Later in the evening we went to the very front of the ship; it was pitch dark save the lights of the ship, and the stars were just fantastic. Just like Mykonos, this will live in my memory for many years to come.
