Sheep Guarding Llama

The storm of the last two days is over and instead we are left with clear air, bright sunshine, little wind and possibly the warmest day since we arrived in Greece.  It is a great day.  Dominica did the laundry and was able to put it outside first thing today.

In the early afternoon the girls asked to walk down to the corner store.  We stepped outside and I ran back inside to get my camera as the day was so nice.  We had a nice walk down to the store and decided that it was so nice that when we got back we asked Dominica if we shouldn’t pack up and run into Rethymno to see the old town with such perfect weather.

It was a rush but we got everyone into the car and drove down and parked on the west side of the Rethymno peninsula right on the water south of the old Venetian Fortezza.  We walked all the way north along the Aegean Sea and all of the way around the Fortezza which was a long walk but the weather was just perfect and the sea was so beautiful.  It was very nice.

We did not go into the Fortezza but walked all around it, it is an incredibly impressive structure and is really a full castle.  Originally Venetian, most of its history it was used by the Ottomans.

From the east side of the Fortezza we went south into the Rethymno old town which Dominica had not even understood was there, I found out (she never goes back and looks at the pictures that I have taken so even though I had been there and told her about it and taken pictures of it, she had no idea.)  The old town is incredible, especially up near the Fortezza where there are just tons of staggeringly gorgeous restaurants and cafes with commanding views of the city behind the Fortezza.

We made it to Mikrasiaton Square, which was probably amazing in its heyday.  Now it is famous for the amount of graffiti, sadly.  It was still a nice central park in the old down, though, and appeared to have an amazing mosque (we are only guessing that it is a mosque) on it.  The folklore museum of Crete is there on the square as is lots of open space.

From the square we left by the western way which, strangely, was a little doorway through a building.  How odd that one of two exits to the largest square in the old town would require going into a tunnel under a building.  It was truly bizarre.

We did not have very much time so really needed to walk briskly and get back to the car.  Everyone was hungry but we did not manage to find a place where we could do something fast like grab a slice of pizza so we gave up and figured that we would each in Atsipopoulo, instead.  Rethymno looks fantastic, though, up on the peninsula and we are thinking about returning on Saturday with lots of time to stroll and time to relax and eat at a restaurant out on the street or something.  There are tons of amazing looking boutique hotels and such throughout the hold town.  Definitely a place on Crete worth staying in if you are vacationing here.  Absolutely gorgeous.

We got back to the and drove up the hill.  Parking was free and easy on the peninsula, although in the summer I wonder if that would remain the case.

In Atsipopoulo we walked all over town trying to find a place that served vegetarian food for us and that would be quick.  We went into three different places and asked.  Two effectively had nothing for us to eat and the third could do pizza but could not do take away nor could they do it quickly.  No dice.

I knew that they could do sandwiches at Momento so we returned there and I got a lettuce, tomato and green bell pepper for Liesl and a cheese sandwich for Ciana.  Both girls were just starving and could not wait for food.  While they ate I had coffee and Dominica ran across the street to get some printing done.  They girls loved their sandwiches.  Both said that they might be their favourite sandwiches ever (except for Subway, of course, Liesl has to add.)

On the drive home Luciana said “What a lovely day this has been.”  We got some great pictures of the city, too.  It was a very good day out, even if was very short.

We got home and were able to park by the church again.  I had a phone call shortly after we were back.  I put in a few hours of writing this evening before taking time to spend time with the girls playing video games.

Dominica even came in to join us this evening, although she was in the room with us and did not really play.  The girls have been excited to play the first of the Fairy Tale Mysteries series from Googi games (in Canada – who, by the way, are so rude as to block their video game company website from Greece, seriously Googi?)  We put in an hour or two on that with the girls basically playing all on their own.  They are getting good at these.

Dominica went to bed before midnight.  Luciana decided to watch some videos in the other room so Liesl and I did not continue on the game without her and instead switched to Emily’s Wonder Wedding which is a time management game.  Liesl enjoyed that a lot, but we just played it for a little bit to check it out.

Our last game for the evening was the old classic hidden object from Spintop: Amazing Adventures Around the World.  The first location in the game that we played tonight was, I think, actually Rethymno and the Fortezza that we walked around today!  Talk about timing!  Absolutely crazy.  The game is a classic hidden object where you just do hidden object puzzles, no adventure game to go along with them like most of the modern HOPA (Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure) games.  Liesl and I had a good time playing that.  It’s fast paced, just one hidden object scene and then one puzzle based on it (like find the differences between two scenes) so no getting bored wondering what to do, it’s just one puzzle right on to the next.

The storm continued through the night and nearly all day today.  These are continuous winds like we have never experienced.  We only lost power a little during the night, thankfully, but it did make it difficult to sleep with the CPAP cutting out regularly.

All throughout the day we were without power and, consequently, without Internet.  It made everything tough from trying to write, keeping up on posts, Liesl’s school work, playing games, watching videos and, of course, going outside was not an option, it was a crazy storm!  The storm was so intense that Dominica and I went up on the terrace at one point to watch it and we watched, in the two minutes that we were up there, huge heavy tiles tear off of the neighbour’s roof right next door!

The pool pump in our own courtyard had it’s fibre glass cover ripped right off, even though it had bricks sitting on it to hold it down!  The bricks were thrown into the pool along with the remains of the cover.

At one point while the power was out I walked down to the corner store and talked to the guy working at the front.  He said that the power was out everywhere and that the storm had already killed a guy in Chania by dropping a tree onto his car.

So our day was a lot of scrambling to do things when we could and just sitting around the house when we could not.  For the most part the power stayed on, only two long periods of over an hour without power and the Internet was always on as long as we had power.

By evening the light had turned a reddish yellow.  It turns out this is called the Red Wind and is Sahara sand blowing in from Africa, which is not far away at all.

I woke up with my CPAP blocking my air this morning as the power was out.  It was out for rather a while.  During the night a wind storm had kicked up and the whole island is being shaken around.

It was a difficult day for getting things done as the power was on and off all of the time.  Very frustrating.  Very little chance to do much of anything.  And the wind was so loud and intense, all day.  Totally crazy.

We heard that the storm is expected to not just last all day but all night and all day tomorrow as well!  I’ve never had wind like this.  Absolutely crazy.

It was a short weekend away seeing Crete but it was a lot of fun and we are really glad that we did it.  Today I had to put in a lot of time getting pictures and videos uploaded.  If I am not careful the devices will all fill up!

I was up very late last night dealing with moving MangoLassi from Rackspace over to Linode. It was one of those spur of the moment things where there was a lull and an opportunity and I was available and there was really no reason not to so I just did it. It was a huge migration and with all of the prep that I did it was done in fifteen minutes and really… no one noticed!  The move is a 300% – 400% capacity increase so a really big deal.

Today was busy with sleeping in late and working on posts, writing and media uploads.  Not very much happening at home.  It was a busy weekend and everyone wanted to relax.

This is it, today begins our “last of” everything routine.  Tonight is the last Monday evening on Crete, for example.  Dominica started packing serious today.  She was packing pretty much all day and, by the end of the day, had enough packed that it was pretty difficult to be doing anything more this early.

Really hard to believe that we are wrapping up Greece already.  Time does fly living like this.  Every day is an adventure.

Today is Sunday and our last day in Crete’s capital of Irakleio.  We did great and were awake by a little after eight, a practical miracle for us.  We showered, got the kids ready, got the room packed up and were out the door pretty quickly.   Not a rush, we had time to get ready at a decent pace, but we were efficient and focused.

We checked out, packed up the Kia and were on our way.  We had a pretty good idea of where we had to drive, about fifteen kilometres east of the city centre where we were staying.  Not a bad drive at all.  The kids knew that they were getting a surprise today but had no idea what we were going to be spending the day doing.

Dominica had found the Dinosaur Museum called Dinosauria while doing some online research and it looked really good.  We were very lucky as it was open only on Sundays because of having a sort of soft opening for the season or something.  They had recently done some renovations and there was a lot new and changed so they seemed to be testing things out before getting back into full swing.  So this worked out great for us as so many other things are closed on Sundays but it is one of the few days that we can reliably get out and attempt to do something.

We pulled into the dinosaur museum and the girls were very excited.  They saw the signs and knew what it was.  They both love museums and love dinosaurs.  We arrived at a good time, there was barely anyone there.

Admission was forty eight Euros for the four of us, which included the cost of doing the 3D movie thing that costs more.  Dominica and I stopped and got coffee before going in as we had not had anything all morning.

The first part of the museum was just fossil recreations in a traditional museum setting.  This was nice and informative and very “museum” feeling.  Liesl enjoyed it but Luciana was a little frightened of it.  Although I was never sure if she was afraid because they were bones, dinosaurs or just that she was worried that parts of the exhibit might fall onto her because the latter is what she actually stated was her fear (some heavy pieces were suspended from the ceiling to explain this concern.)

After that portion you go through a “portal” that takes you back in time (although this is explained no where) and then then you go through an indoor section for a while that has “live” animatronic dinosaurs that was nice but not very long.  I was surprised how quickly we were moved outside (although we were moving at our own pace, we never saw any other people indoors) but then we discovered that the majority of the “park” was outside, not inside.  This is fairly customary in consistently good weather countries like this.  Once we were outside Luciana was very happy.

The outside park was loaded with enormous, moving, animatronic dinosaur exhibits.  It was really well done and covered a lot of space.  We were quite impressed with the scale here.  Dominica said that the dinosaurs here were better than Disney’s Universe of Energy and on par with their Dinosaur: The Ride.

We took some time and did nearly all of the outdoor dinosaur park stuff.  There is a waterfall and a little river running through the park and a pond in the middle with Dominica’s favourite dinosaur in it.

Everyone really enjoyed this part of the park.  And the weather was perfect.  We had started with jackets but decided to ditch them once we were in the sun.  It was cool enough that being in the sun felt just right.  We could not have had better weather and that was really fortunate considering just one week ago today we were caught in the terrible, cold rain storm during the Carnival Parade in Rethymno and all week, including yesterday, it has been very cold here on Crete.

While we were out in the park, one of the “park guides”, Anna, came and gathered the girls to take them to see the “Dinosaur Hospital.”  This was an indoor exhibit designed to demonstrate how Dinosauria envisioned a modern dinosaur veterinary clinic would operate if dinosaurs existed still today and needed to be treated for injuries and wounds.  In reality this was mostly a play on the intro to Jurassic Park to the point that they even had “Mr. DNA” and some scenes casually acted out.  It was neat, though, and the park guide walked Liesl mostly (Luciana is not the dinosaur expert like Liesl is who grew up watching “Dinosaur Train” religiously) on a personal educational lesson of the dinosaur hospital facility.  This was really nice.

After the hospital there was a crafts area where the girls were given pens, markers and pencils and encouraged to draw dinosaurs.  They both did this and had a nice time.  They both did multiple pictures.

After doing the dinosaur drawings, the girls went out with Anna and she showed them where the sand pit to dig for dinosaur fossils was located.  She helped Luciana for a while and got her working on digging out some partially exposed bones.  It was very nice.

Liesl then set to work trying to excavate something new.  Liesl was sad because she had tried to do this same thing at a museum in Dallas many years ago and all of the bigger kids there had managed to find bones and she did not find a single thing.  We had the same issue today, Luciana had bones immediately and Liesl put in at least half of an hour without finding anything (mostly because she was completely refusing to be methodical about it or to dig down deep enough to find things.)  I had to step in and do some hard digging in the wet sand while she was away so that I could get down to where there were going to be bones.  Then we let her come back and suddenly… she found bones under just a dusting of sand.  She was so excited and it really made her day.

After the sand digging we finished up the walking around the park and went in to see the 3D movie.

There were actually two movies.  The theatre was little and sadly full of screaming kids from a single birthday party group other than the four of us.  We got the front row.  This is one of those theatres with moving seats so the girls sat on either side of me and I held onto them and Dominica had a row to herself.  The polish on the presentation here was weak.  They had a Windows XP desktop up and running with the desktop on the screen and just moving the mouse around to run an MPEG file for the videos.  Pretty silly.

The videos were very, very obviously low budget Chinese stuff.  Like really, really bad.  Even the file names and everything was in Mandarin and the credits looked like those silly late 1970s Golden Harvest films that Jackie Chan did when he was unable to get out of his early contracts. The film itself was horrible and made no sense.  It was in 3D but was just gibberish.  Parts of it were actually forgotten to be rendered – at a few points there would be a major scene object rendered for one eye and missing completely from the other eye for ten seconds or so then suddenly “pop” it would appear for the other eye – talk about phoning in the project!  The whole thing looked far worse than my current laptop could render a game on the fly!!

There was a second movie which was a horrible decade old Chinese roller coaster rendered film that was just so cheesy and I actually recognized it as one that I saw like a decade ago at some museum and thought that it was pretty terrible all of those years ago.  To see it again now was a bit sad.

The moving seats were pretty rough.  They were not set up to move properly with the films so it did not add anything but was actively confusing to the action on screen.  There was no finesse either, just all the way right, left or centre so even the tiniest action on screen either meant that you confusingly felt nothing or you were thrown violently to one side or the other far out of sync with the movie itself.

Dominica and I were not impressed but the girls were very happy and thought that it was a lot of fun.  So I guess that we cannot complain.  The reviews that Dominica had read said that they movies were fun for kids maybe up to ten but no older.  So we lucked out there.  The four and the seven year old approve.

That was it for the museum activities on the “inside”, next up was heading out to the large playground that the museum has.  This is, in reality, what the girls were most looking forward to.  Even though we have gone to the little playground in Irakleio the last two evenings, that one was little, there were very few kids, it was always late and for the most part there has been nowhere for them to put in some serious playground time the entire time that we have been in Greece.  They are big time playground kids so this is really important.

We spent the whole afternoon out on the playground.  We went through several coffees and a few sandwiches and two bottles of water while we sat out there.  The girls just played and played.  They had such a good time.  A huge playground, full of kids and amazing weather and tons of free time all on the same day!  It does not get much better than that.

Liesl decided that today ranked as the third best surprised day of all time (the best ever was some pajama day thing with her cousins that I was not around for.)

Almost immediately the girls made a new friend, Eva, on the playground.  Eva was also four, the same age as Luciana, and Eva’s mother was hanging out in the little kid playground facility with Eva.  Our girls ended up introducing themselves and making friends and hanging out with them for hours.  Eva’s parents ended up staying all afternoon, just like us, so that the kids could play together.

We were probably done with the museum itself by one but we stayed on the playground until after four.  Everyone was exhausted by that point and the park itself closes at five.  We were just about the last people there when we finally started to pack up to leave.

Eva’s parents invited us over to their house, which was not far away, for coffee and to let the kids play for a while.  The girls were really excited to go to go over and hang out but then they remembered that they had a prior engagement this evening and were not able to have us over.  The girls were then very sad.  But we got their email and phone number as they want to keep in touch.  The girls have been needing friends to keep in contact with so this is really great!  We are invited to all get together and hang out the next time that we are on Crete and were told that we should come back in the summer when the beaches are in full swing.

The girls each got a stuffed dinosaur and a “grows in water” dinosaur egg from the gift shop before leaving and Dominica found a zipper pull thing that says “Francescasaurus” on it and as there are never things like that with Francesca’s name on it she had to get it for her.

Everyone was asleep almost immediately once we were in the car and on the hour and a half drive back from the Dinosauria Park to Prines on the far western side of Rethymno.  It was not a bad drive but we were so tired, I was not in the mood for driving at that point.

It was not quite yet dark when we pulled into Prines.  The convenient parking by the church was all full and I went to drive to the back side of the village where there is space to park and ended up in one of those nose to nose situations where I had to back the car up through a street that was so narrow that most people would have been unwilling or possibly unable to drive through it forwards.  Always a fun challenge driving in Europe in these old villages.

We got everyone into the house, which is still pretty cold over here, and we were ready for doing “nothing” all evening.  Dominica camped out right away to do some reading.  Luciana and I did a little Sonic and Sega All Star Racing.  Then I set to catching up online, getting SGL updated and such.  We had a light dinner, just leftovers or whatever was around the house – this is our final week in Prines and we have to finish up all of the food in the house!

I cannot believe it, our time in Prines is over.  This is crazy.  Three months is not long enough at all for these stays.  We have now been in Prines longer than we have been in any other destination for the past year and it barely feels like we have been here.  We leave on the ferry from Chiana one week from tomorrow to work our way up to Athens.

Luciana and I played a little bit of some video games later on in the evening but not much.  Liesl played some Sims 3 and Luciana played some Castaway Paradise on their own.  Mostly they just watching videos.  Liesl sat in the living room watching Sailor Moon on the television and Luciana was watching YouTube on Dominica’s laptop.

It was an incredibly long but a really awesome day.  This was educational, fun and exhausting.  This is what a travelling family day is supposed to be like.  A major success.