I fought through my dreams to wakefulness. Yes, someone was really knocking, but who could it be in the middle of the night? I nudged Husband awake, and he shuffled to the door.
Adonis stood in the hallway in his sleeping shorts. Our phones off, we had received neither his nor Murphy’s texts about the most recent COVID-19 developments coming out of the United States.
“Trump is saying all Americans abroad should come home now,” Adonis said, his tone even.
“Oh.” Sleep blurred Husband’s voice. “Okay.”
A beat of silence.
Adonis again. “I’ll just leave it there.”
The door closed behind his words, Husband returned to bed, and questions prodded me. After only a few days into it, would we have to end our vacation? What choice did we have? And how hard would it be now to arrange a new flight home?
The next morning, Murphy waited on the phone for almost an hour with Delta Airlines to check for updates.
“No cancellations on any flights to the U.S. yet,” she said.
The four of us met at the patio table to discuss our next steps. If our flights home were still on—and they were—we might as well enjoy the day.
Chania, a city on the northwest coast of Crete, beckoned us, but on our way to the car, so did the hot tub. I strolled over to it, imagining a relaxing soak at the end of our day.
I swished my hand through the water. “Yikes. It’s freezing.”
Husband dipped a hand in too. “Maybe they don’t feel like heating it for just the six of us staying here.”
As we passed through the reception area, I strode toward the desk where Stathis sat. He jumped from his chair to meet me.
“Could we use the hot tub later?” I asked, curving my words with a smile. “Seems like it’s turned off. The water’s cold.”
“Tell us thirty minutes before you want it,” he said, “and we’ll heat it for you.”
After an hour-long drive, we rolled into Chania, a city known for its 14th-century Venetian harbor, colorful architecture, and influences showing Venice had annexed Crete, and the Ottoman Turks had conquered the island too, once upon a time.
We explored the city on foot, wandering through a meat market with its fresh seafood and specialty shops. While we enjoyed coffee (note to self and others: don’t stir Turkish coffee; let the grounds stay on the bottom of the cup) at a café in the market, a friendly cat slinked by our legs.
I asked the employee behind the counter the whereabouts of a restroom, and he motioned for me to follow him—behind the counter, through a back door, and outside. He pointed in the direction of where I would find what I needed.
A number of yards away, I took the steps down to the underground ladies’ room and discovered not a toilet behind each door, but a hole in the floor. I flipped through my memories of public restrooms in France and other countries. Had I ever used one like this?
During my respite in the stall, a question jabbed me. Where was the toilet paper? Maybe it was becoming scarce in Greece like I heard it was in the U.S. because of the pandemic. I looked around, though, and way above my head I spied a roll—something I should’ve taken a swath of while I was still standing, not now while squatting. But we live and learn and hope we remember our vacation lessons for the next time. (And we’re grateful for the Kleenexes in our purses, if we’re lucky enough to have them.)
We strolled along Chania’s harbor, the wind ruffling our hair and jackets. The Greek poet Homer praised Crete as the island that lies “out in the wine-dark sea… a rich and lovely sea-girt land, densely peopled, with 90 cities and several different languages.” And the ancient Minoans had lived right here, this present city built on their history, excavators and archeologists much later unearthing the layers of their lives.
We selected a lunch spot off one of the narrow streets. Our server, the only employee there, greeted us with a smile, indicating an outdoor table for us. We possessed two qualities of good tourists: hungry and open-minded, so we pointed to several dishes on the menu—whether we knew what we were getting into or not—since she didn’t speak English.
The woman repeated the name of each item we tapped on. She ended with one more. “Staka,” she said, nodding.
“No,” Murphy said, shaking her head and waving a hand. “No staka. Thank you.”
The server disappeared with our order. She set to work cooking it all herself and returned with fries, pita bread, fried zucchini, tzatziki, salad—and staka.
As we tasted the staka—a Cretan roux dish made from eggs and goat milk fat—we hadn’t ordered, the word serendipity bloomed in my mind. Maybe the best vacations are the ones strewn with delicious mistakes like this one.
In Rethymno for dinner that night, we drove to a restaurant Dosia recommended when I had asked her earlier where we could find falafel.
“What’s that?” she said at first.
Wasn’t falafel a staple here? It had been almost impossible to find. Or was it more Middle Eastern than Mediterranean? I described to Dosia the chickpea balls, fried in oil.
“Oh, yes,” she said, her face brightening. She wrote down the name of falafel in Greek, so we could show it to the server, and in English letters for us too: revitho keftedes.
We feasted on delicious meats, courgette balls, garlicky mashed potatoes, and more, at the Taverna Zisi. Falafel, however, was nowhere to be found.
Back at the timeshare, the jacuzzi sat in frigid stillness. Stathis was gone for the day. Instead, a man named Thomas worked the desk, his English scant. Maybe we could remedy the hot tub situation ourselves without disrupting him.
Adonis, Husband, and I poked at a few buttons on the tub, to no avail.
Thomas appeared next to us. He might have confronted us about our tinkering with the tub. He certainly said something about it—maybe that it needed time or fixing or to be left alone. Confused, we nodded and left the cold water for our warm beds.
The next morning, Husband and Adonis talked to Stathis about the situation.
“Could we get the water in the hot tub warmed up for tonight?” Husband asked.
“I know what you did last night,” the man said, a finger raised. Thomas must have reported our previous evening’s troubleshooting. “You tell us when you want to use it. Give us thirty minutes to heat it for you.”
On our trip to Patsos Gorge, I imagined us regaling one another that evening with stories of our hike while sitting in a steaming jacuzzi, thanks to Stathis. Wild thyme jutted from the ditches on our drive, and goats and sheep speckled the kilometers of the roadside along the way while we noshed on two popular kinds of potato chips: BBQ (which tasted like Chicken in a Biskit crackers in the United States) and oregano-flavored chips.
We parked the car and hiked a few minutes from the trailhead into the gorge where we spied a church in a cave—a hermitage with candles, pictures of holy men, and crutches left behind from miracle healings. A wooden bridge over a stream, jagged cliffs, and a distant waterfall graced our explorations.
We wandered into the Taverna Drimos at the trailhead, a huge establishment—chilly inside and void of humanity, except for us—with many long wooden tables and benches to accommodate all the visitors who would come later in the season. A couple of employees emerged from the back to check on us. On the bar, shot glasses circled the obligatory bottle of raki, but next to it was something new: a pistol.
I recalled what I read in the Crete 2019 issue of the travel magazine Greece Is back at the timeshare—how the men of old would settle their vendettas by exchanging lead. Nektarios, a coffee shop owner on Crete, interviewed for the article, said something about the custom of sasmos (the settlement of disputes by an elder rather than a judge) and a gun-friendly mentality still prevalent among the mountain folk.
With more of Crete to see, we climbed back into the car. Little roadside shrines—miniature cross-topped churches on poles by the side of the road—marked the mountainous way we navigated on our route to the Libyan Sea. Those markers, sometimes containing religious paraphernalia, serve to remind survivors of their loved ones lost at their automobile crash sites.
Goats and sheep—and their shepherds, this time—also decorated our drive to southern Crete. Once there, we drank in the tranquility of the Preveli Monastery, and numerous cats sashayed by, some brave enough to rub up against us. A small fenced-in area of kri-kri, a Cretan ibex or goat, belonging to the monks, lay thirty feet below us beyond a sprawling Cypress tree.
Thoughts of the Coronavirus never far away, I squinted across the Libyan Sea toward Africa. We were far from home, and how would we get there now? I had read a quote from The Odyssey, and it chose that moment to spring to mind:
… still eager to leave at once and hurry back to your own home, your beloved native land? Good luck to you, even so. Farewell! But if you only knew, down deep, what pains are fated to fill your cup before you reach that shore, you’d stay right here…
Say it wasn’t so.
*Tune in next week for the next installment of our Greece adventures. And now, more pictures.
