Day 102

1:12
Crete:Greece

Sunset Silhouette

I see this picture as being Part 2 of a series starting with Nice Night from Day 47. I'm pretty sure Part 3 will be coming up in a post very soon...

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It's three o'clock AM and our deathtrap of an alarm clock ear fucks us out of our slumber. God damn this pre-dawn traveling, I tell Ally. You're the one that chose to take the earlier ferry, she rebuts. Oh yeah.

There were about 150 passengers, maybe more, on a ferry that had to have weighed approximately 4000 tonnes. This bitch was huge. The lower two decks were occupied by cars, then the upper 3 were for humans. They had a lounge, a bar, a restaurant, individual rooms for first class passengers, a nice open deck at the top, and a large, comfortable lobby area. Somehow, though, they forgot to allow for there to be enough room to accommodate for the 150 of us traveling in economy. This boat, probably almost 70 yards long from bow to stern, had a room no larger than my house for all of us (~25'x40').

Assholes.

Then there were the smart yet douchy passengers that laid themselves out on the floor between rows of seats. Some of them were so prepared that they practically had full beds made. This left precious little space for the rest of us. As I slept sitting perfectly vertically in my seat, if my feet shifted even slightly, they would start to gently rub against the guy's that was sleeping below me. It felt nice until I realized that I was playing footsy with the asshole on the floor.

We rolled (or floated, I guess) into the Crete port at Iraklion just after sunrise at about 7AM. We had contacted our hotel a few days prior to ask the best way to get there from Iraklion, and they gave us a few options:

1. Take a cab for €110, or $175. Crete is big.
2. Rent a car for 7 days and have it ready at the port when we show up. Cost: €180. Eff that, I'm not going to pay that much money for a deathtrap. Greek drivers are terrible. Ktel drivers are even worse, though, which brings me to option 3...
3. Take the ktel.

God damn it. The poopy shit ass ktel again. I'm not going to get into why it sucked - again - but rather skip ahead to 3 o'clock when we finally got to our hotel in Makrigialos. That's right, 12 hours of traveling already accomplished by mid-afternoon.

We had originally thought that we were going to Sitia, a city in northern Crete, because Makrigialos is in the Sitia region of the island. We were kind of surprised when we showed up on the southern coast instead. It was beautiful nonetheless.