Part One: Crete

Okay, look again at this photo:

That is of me running in Potsdam (just a stone's throw from Berlin, by the way) on the eve of our trip to Greece. Now, apparently, because it is in my nature to go all in when I travel, I literally strained my achilles heel on that run and gimped around for the next few days just so the Greeks could see how much I am on their side in this whole Trojan War fiasco. But apart from a nip in the air, and a bigger one in the Mediterranean, Crete was the perfect place to recover...

(Yea, I said my achilles heel, but Grandma, always trying to outdo me, decided to break her arm before the trip. Show off... Anyway, back to my recovery.)

So Crete was our first destination.

We grabbed up our brother,

grabbed a bite to eat,

remembered our snorkling gear,

forced Katy and Bob to drive two rented cars (by cleverly forgetting my own driver's license back in Berlin), navigated the roads,

avoided a few goats,

and other dangerous wildlife,

and got on our way.

Our first day in Crete was Elafonisi, a kind of collection of four or five swimming-pool-like shallow beaches.

The kids swam and played in the water,

built their first sand castles and sand sculptures,

and snorkled.

(Have to thank Uncle Bob for snorkling--and for like a million other things, but snorkling changes the trajectory of our beach-going experience forever. The kids love it!). The adults, as you can see, did a bit of all that, and did a bit of this,

but mostly did this:

recovered. We met up with Maggie (who avoided the car-rental debacle and first-day jitters by cleverly trying to travel without an updated passport).

We ate a fabulous dinner in Chanai, hit the road the next morning,

swam in some brisk waters a few hours up the coast,

and then ended our Cretian adventure by nearly getting lost in the Labyrinth of Heraklion.

And, for some reason, Suzy and I took very few pictures of anything in Crete after Elafonisi (Katy, too). Regardless, we grabbed up our things early the next morning,

and magaged to grab this shot on the ferry as the sun was rising (--don't look too closely at Scout),

and I grabbed up my Suzy--Odysseus and Penelope,

on our way to the next part of our Greek adventure: Naxos.