After yesterday’s frustrating attempt at going to see Knossos, today we took the time to relax a bit as a family and spent much of it in the game room playing video games together. It was a really nice day, we all enjoyed it a lot.
Dominica and I started in on Highrise Heroes as soon as we got up. We are determined to beat this game. We love it, but it is really, really hard towards the end. The game “tricks” you with thinking that there are 100 levels, then you get reminded that it is not an American game and they start number with zero, so there should be 101. Then you go into the basement and there turns out to be something like 121 levels. The story was interesting and we mostly liked the ending and are definitely hoping for a sequel. Fallen Tree Games (who also make the Quell series) are known for making sequels to puzzle games so we are hopeful that this one will be getting a sequel (or two), too.
One of the things that we really enjoyed on Highrise Heroes was that at the end of every level you received your global ranking so that you could see how you were doing, not just in comparison to yourself but against everyone, everywhere. That made for a lot of fun and we knew that if we were in the top one hundred players in the world that we were doing well and on nearly all levels we were in the top eight and on some we were in the teens!!
Liesl wanted to play a game so Dominica and she played Scribblenauts Unlimited which was a perfect game for them (it is only a one player game, Dominica was helping Liesl play) as it is a fun, word puzzle cartoon game definitely meant for kids. They played that for quite a while and had a lot of fun (and a lot of arguing because that’s how they are.)
Liesl played Castaway Paradise for quite a while today. She did really well and is nearly ready to become a “VIP”. One more good day of playing and she will make it to the VIP levels for sure.
This evening we talked the girls, cajoled is probably more accurate, into watching the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation with us. That’s the double feature “Mission to Farpoint” episode that is nearly two hours long, it is essentially a made for TV movie. On Netflix the two episodes are merged into one. You can’t even tell where the separation was supposed to happen.
The girls kind of liked it. I thought that for sure that Liesl would love it but she mostly just put up with it. Luciana said that she really liked it, though. But, I suppose, I was around Luciana’s age when I first started watching the original Star Trek with my dad.
For family game night tonight, after our show, we settled in and played Telltale Games’ Jurassic Park. We have not played that game since we tested it out while we were in Nicaragua. It’s a really cool game that takes place during the first movie, using different characters in the park while the movie is going on. It is a really neat idea and tells more of the story of the movie. Very well done and totally makes you feel like you are taking part in the movie. But it is also very high stress and hard to play for any length of time. It is quite taxing and I am the only one that can handle having the controls. The game is scary enough that both of the girls like to hide under blankets for much of it as dinosaurs tend to jump out at you rather suddenly. It’s not a horror game, but it is an intense one.
It was a really nice day together as a family. And that wraps up February, 2016 and it wraps up our second month in Greece.
Dominica, Liesl and I managed to get up “early” this morning. We have been excited to get up and get out and explore the island now that we have a working car and no one is sick. Getting Luciana up and moving took a few hours. But we finally got her out the door around two. A major accomplishment for the Miller household in Greece.
Our first issue of the day was getting to our car and discovering that we were boxed in. Being boxed in is a bit worse in Prines than it is in some random town. Our parking spot is on rather a serious incline with the car pointed up the hill. The front of the car was against the uneven concrete wall of the church and a truck and the backend had a Spanish Seat parked only inches away from the bumper. To make it more challenging, the clutch on the Kia is terrible – the distance that I have to move my foot from the brake to the clutch is completely ridiculous and there is no way to do it quickly enough to not be a problem. I have to pretty much knee the steering wheel and then get the clutch at least 40% down before it engages in the least. It’s horrible.
So this was quite the challenge. Dominica would never have attempted this, even without the car being a standard. We had the girls stand up at the church so that they would not be in any danger of a lurching car or traffic. Dominica got in front to guide me as there was no room for error. The front of the car had to go hard to the right without slamming into the side of the truck that it was up against while getting as far forward as possible to give me every possible inch to go backwards.
The clutch on the car is just impossible and I could not do the manoeuvre without spinning the wheels something terrible. I did it in a couple of lurches and got the car as far up as we dared to move it. The Dominica came along side and helped me guide the car back bringing the front bumper on a sharp turn less than an inch from the uneven and out of sight church wall while making sure that I cleared the car behind me, which even with all of that was a near thing. Even with bringing the car as dangerously high and fast up the hill as I could and with Dominica guiding it and essentially scraping the wall beside it, the real only barely cleared the car next to it and even getting the nearest points of the bumpers to clear it was still a close thing to get the car alongside enough to get the mirrors to clear. Ridiculous. It was obvious when the car behind us parked there that they had completely boxes us in. But, we made it. Barely. We could have very easily just been stuck. And once we tried to move the car, it could have gotten stuck so much worse. It was rather risky.
I stopped the car down at the store and waited for the family to come down and climb in. Then we were off to head down to the highway, route 90, and off to the east.
The drive went fine. It was a nice, warm, clear day. Perfect for a drive along the coast. The highway is a bit windy, and the wind was strong today too blowing us all over the road. We made it about an hour before Luciana had an issue with something (I think that she had dropped something that she needed us to pick up or had a window that we needed to adjust) so I pulled over in front of a gas station out on the highway and turned around and Liesl was looking ill and I saw her nibbling a Peptol Bismol tablet and she said “I think I’m going to throw up” and Dominica scrambled to get out of the car (they were on the side away from the highway, both of them) but before she could even get her seatbelt untangled from her scarf Liesl was throwing up in the backseat unable to get out of her carseat herself. It was pretty horrible.
Had we known that she was going to be sick we could have pulled into the car station, or stopped earlier, and would have been ready to jump from the car. We were very thankful that at least Luciana had caused us to pull over for something trivial and that I had picked a spot with a service station.
We got Liesl out of the car, it was motion sickness making her stomach upset. Luciana was fine and unaffected by the whole affair. Dominica looked after Liesl while I ran in to the little store and got some paper towels and bought a pack of wet wipes. I came back out and cleaned up the car as best as I could. What a mess. All over the seat, car seat, back of Dominica’s seat and floor. Poor Liesl, what a way to start the day. It could have been much worse, though.
Once things were cleaned up, Dominica took both girls into the service station to use the bathroom and clean up and get some drinks and just take a break from the car. I moved the car into the parking lot and parked it off to the side and got all of the windows open so that it could start to dry and air out.
We ended up picking up some snacks, even Liesl felt like she should eat, and probably killed half an hour before getting back in the car and continuing on to Irákleio so that we could go to the ruins at Knossos, which is why we had come on this trip.
Navigating the city was not too bad and we found the road heading down to Knossos without much trouble. Finding Knossos on that road, however, was a bit of a challenge. Considering that this is one of the world’s most important archaeological sites and by far the most important thing on all of Crete you would think that it would be relatively easy to find. It is not. Not at all.
We went to one place that had some signs and packed in an enormous parking lot that seemed like it had to be the right place, but there were no clear signs telling us where to go. I left the family at the car and walked around a bit to see if I could figure things out but, I could not. We determined that this could not be the ruins so got back in the car and continued on. This was where Google Maps said that we should be. Google Maps is not very useful, we have found.
We drove way out of the town of Knossos, turned around at an ancient aqueduct, and took another run out it. This time I spotted the parking spot for the ruins and pulled in. We were then granted the view of a group of twenty somethings go and try to enter the ruins and find that it was closed. Closed an hour before all of the guides that we had said that it should close. There aren’t things like websites for these things, you are stuck relying on non-authoritative information and you can easily get stuck like this. So a whole day of trying to get out and see Knossos amounting to nothing. And even being here there is nothing that tells us when it might be open next time.
Back in the car and back up to Irákleio. We drove around the city just a little and did a loop through the old town. Going through Dominica spotted a cafe that she liked the looks of so we swung in there, got a table and ordered pizza and coffee. It took a really long time but the coffee was amazing and the pizza quite good. Everyone enjoyed dinner. We got some ice cream after dinner, but while Luciana was willing to eat it, neither Liesl nor I liked it at all. It was completely bland.
Coffee on Crete
We finished out early dinner, got back in the car and as the children requested, we drove back west to Prines and called it a day.
Tonight we just took it easy and relaxed at home after what was rather a frustrating day attempting to see Crete.
I was up at nine this morning and Dominica just after ten. I think that our schedules are improving. Liesl had asked Dominica to get her up and not let her sleep in today, too, because she did not want to miss too much of the day by oversleeping because she has a tendency to sleep through her weekends and be sad that they are then gone.
The weather is nice today, again, sunny and breezy. Other than some big wind storms at night a couple of times we have been under great weather for a couple of weeks straight now.
Liesl has really figured out the Castaway Paradise and is dedicated to playing it at least a little every day. She made level fourteen today and opened the last arch to the last part of the game that she has been walled off from. Her last major gateway to break through is the “VIP” gateway at level fifteen. She is very excited to get to that point.
Tonight Dominica and I played Highrise Heroes for a while, we were hopeful that we were going to be able to make a run on finishing the game but found that the levels at this point are way too hard and we cannot complete it tonight, we had to call it a night with four levels left. It was exhausting and we had to do many of the levels that we had over again. We had gotten stuck around level fifteen the other night because we simply could not complete the time challenge. But tonight I played it alone for a while and figured out that we could eliminate the time challenge to make the levels easier (but capping our score.) So we did that and it let us move forward, while still being super difficult.
After that we started playing The League of Supreme Patriots tonight which is a well made, very off the beaten path point and click adventure game. It took us a while to figure out the puzzle system and the girls insisted on controlling the game themselves which did nothing to speed things up, and pretty soon Dominica had fallen asleep anyway, but we had a good time playing it and look forward to the season.
Nothing fancy today. My week, which I had originally thought was likely to be on the slow side, had turned out to be overly busy and I needed some time to just have downtime today. Which I did, and it was nice.
I was up at nine thirty this morning, a big before Dominica and long before the girls.
I ended up having a rather busy day all day working on getting some projects done.
I did manage to wrap up in the early evening, probably around seven or seven thirty, and spent the evening hanging out with Dominica. We have been excited about this week’s release of the Netflix original series Fuller House for months. We were in Galveston this past fall when I saw that it was being advertised on YouTube. It is the “nearly three decades later” continuation of the mid-1980s ABC Television show Full House that we both loved when we were kids. It’s amazing as they got the entire original case (except for the baby who wasn’t a real part of the show anyway, so nothing is lost) back together including the entire family and almost all of the ancillary cast.
We had been joking that the release of Fuller House was my fortieth birthday present as it came out the day after I turned forty. The star of the show is almost exactly my age as well, turning forty herself in just a few weeks, so it makes the show that much of a connection for me as it was always about someone exactly my age.
So tonight we binge watched the entire first season of Fuller House, all thirteen episodes of it. It was great. The first episode was pretty much nothing but an homage to the original show but after that they started to go in their own direction, although the show is designed and handles well picking up exactly where the original left off. In many ways, you feel like you never stopped watching it even though the original has now been off of the air for twenty one years!
We had a great time. Watching Fuller House was a huge trip down memory lane. We really enjoyed it. It kept us up rather late, but we’ve spent a whole season (or over two decades depending on how you look at it) for this to come out.
Well, it happened, I finally turned forty. Hard to believe. Well, not really. The reality is that I have been feeling like I was in my forties for at least the last four years if not longer. So the fact that I am now actually forty does not really seem all that weird. Not weird at all, to be honest.
The thing that is probably strangest to me is that I remember my dad turning forty. I might have memories of my parents’ birthdays prior to that one, but none stand out in my mind. But my dad turning forty felt like it was a big event. And if I was old enough to remember that and am now at that age myself… that is the biggest thing that “feels odd” about being this age. I am now, for the first time, at an age that seemed like a big deal for my dad to be turning this age. And that, of course, was thirty years ago this coming June. Of the time that I was a child, at home with my parents, the majority of it was spent with my dad being in his thirties! I am already past that age. Of course, for me, the majority of the time with my children will be in my forties, but the significance is not lost on me.
I had originally thought that I would have a mostly relaxing day today, but it turned out that there was some pressing projects that had my name on them so I ended up actually having a rather busy day until late evening and got very little time to relax.
Liesl made sure that I had a Swiss cake roll available, my favourite kind with vanilla filling, to have as my birthday cake. She is very thoughtful. We did not end up eating it, though. I was never in the mood for any cake.
Mostly my birthday passed with little mention, as it normally does. I got hundreds of happy birthdays on Facebook and such, but as I don’t go in for any kind of celebration, it is all but unnoticed here. Dominica had wanted to go out and do something for my birthday, but the day was long and there was not a good time do to it tonight. So we decided to do it tomorrow night. Today is Thursday, anyway, not a great night for going out to dinner.
