Yesterday evening, Christi finally started to feel better, which was a relief. She was really beginning to worry about it taking so long to recover. In the evening, we went out and explored town some more. We walked down some streets we hadn’t taken before and found a nice little short cut to the swimming beach and line of restaurants on the other side of the commercial harbor. Here is a shot of the marina from one of the streets we were on.

We picked a restaurant and sat down. We ordered the stuffed lamb, and we are happy to report it was unbelievably good. The lamb was stuffed with two kinds of cheese, and the rolls were held together with grape leaves. The lamb was so tender you could cut it with a fork, and it was not gamey at all. It ranks high on the list of best meals we have had in Greece. We also ordered a Cretan salad, which is on all the menus in Crete, but we hadn’t tried yet. It has greens, hard boiled eggs, boiled potatoes, cucumber, feta cheese, oregano, olive oil, and croutons made of the barley dakos bread. The croutons were unseasoned, and we decided we didn’t like the plain, dry dakos bread much, but the rest of the salad was good.

While we were enjoying dinner, the moon rose full and bright over the horizon as the sun was setting. It was spectacular enough to see the sunset making the sky and mountains glow a variety of pretty colors, and contrasted against the glow of the moon it was even more breathtaking. As it got darker, the moon just glowed more vividly against the night sky. Mother Nature really put on a good performance for us tonight! We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect sunset/moonlit dinner. By the way, most of the restaurants in Crete and Athens are outdoor cafés.

This morning we went back to Bali to spend more time with the family. We left in the early afternoon, and decided to do some sightseeing along the way. We went to a town called Kritsa. It is a small, cute village in the hills above Agios Nickolaos. It looks much the same as the rest of the small hill villages, though many of the buildings look to be pretty new. After driving all through town, we found a restaurant and had a traditional European style long, leisurely lunch (read: slow service). Once we were done with lunch, we headed to the archeological site just outside town. We were sad to see it closed at 1500 (3:00pm), and we had just missed it. Darn.

We headed to the town of Malia, planning to go to another archeological site there. We had a hard time finding the place, so we wound up taking a drive through town. We’d been through town on the main road several times now, and it was nice to see a little more. This town is on flat land, but still has narrow, windy roads. We did eventually find the archeological site. It turns out there were signs, but the signs were overshadowed by bigger and more attention grabbing ads for private industry tourist attractions, so we had overlooked the small historical site signs. We were sad to see this site also closed at 1500. Figuring all the ruins closed at 1500, we gave up on playing tourist and went to Bali.

As always, we had a fun time hanging out with the Costas, Maria and Koralia, and a couple of French friends of theirs who were in town. As always, it somehow turned into a late night.