Motorcycle

Since the last post all of our time has been spent in Greece, three nights in Athens and then five nights in Chiana, Crete. Athens was fine and all. The acropolis was cool and really old but Neal and I will remember mostly for having cheap food and being ridiculously hot. I have never spent three hotter nights in my life. I was drinking about four liters of water a day. The other major accomplishment of mine, in Athens was reading Harry Potter. I was able to secure a copy and I read it in two days. It was time well spent. I don't care where you are in the world a new Harry Potter book should be your number one priority. I have more to say about Athens but it will have to wait because the best stories are from Crete.

I do not even know how to being with Crete. We went there rather randomly because it was the first ferry we could get out of Athens and we said, why not. It has been some of the best days of the trip and I cannot even being to relate all of them here. So I just tell one for now. Today was our last day in Crete and we decided to rent scooters. What could be more fun, or dangerous than Neal and I on scooters. The first snag, however was that you need a motorcycle endorsement to get anything larger then 50cc. This is a problem because you aren't allowed to take the 50cc scooters more than 25 km away from the rental place. We of course wanted to take them all over the island. After exploring all possibilities we decided to rent the 50cc scooters and ignore the 25km rule. After all we were leaving the country the next day.

We went out in the morning and just drove down the road a ways and picked a little village back away from the coast to try and get to first, in order to get our feet wet on the bikes. Now Crete was formed by the European and African plates colliding and pushing the earth’s crust upwards. This means that it is very mountainous and as soon as you get away from the coast it is hilly. We spent about two hours just cursing around the hills, up and down, around curves. It was a lot of fun. Then we went down into Chaina, the main city for lunch. City driving on a scooter in Europe is an experience I will not soon forget. There are no lanes, stop sings mean slow down a little, and if you aren't weaving in and out of cars on your scooter people look at you funny. Once we escaped Chaina and got some food we decided to head out along the coast out to beach we saw on our map. It looked like a nice long ride and was only slightly out of our range. 40 km is kinda close to 25 right? The coast was gorgeous and we followed the rode along and then up a hill and could see out over the whole bay and city. I am sure the beach would have been amazing however about half way there the road went from being paved, to dirt and rather large rocks. If we had paid more attention to our map we would have know this as yellow lines indicate unpaved roads. We then decided if we couldn’t head out to beach we would o up into the mountains. Neal took the opportunity to fill up his tank while I had about 3/4 left and did not. This decision will come into play later. We went about 50 km up into the mountains. It was the best part of the whole day and a highlight of the trip. The scenery was some of the best I have ever seen. It rivals that out in the Rockies. The rode wound back and forth up the mountain and when we got to the top we able to look out over the valley and where we had been about an hour earlier. It was at this point that we found out why the only want you go 25km away, and it involves a lack of gas stations. To be continued.