Today we woke up to a beautiful sunny day in Chania! The wind had died down and it was quite lovely. After breakfast we decided to check out the central market before heading out of town. We were surprised that the market was a bit more geared toward tourists than we had anticipated. There were still fish and meat stalls, but there were also stalls selling t-shirts, spices and other gear for the out of towners. We picked up a few things and enjoyed our walk around town. We were sad to say goodbye to the honeymoon suite at Domus Renier Boutique Hotel, but we were headed over the mountains to the south of Crete.

When we got to our rental car we realized it was parked next to the town's weekly farmer's market. So we took a stroll through that as well. The vegetables were huge! And they also had a lot of fruit for sale that looked quite good. After a quick run through the market we headed out of Chania. Kevin was able to navigate through the city streets and that gave way to a nice highway for a while. As we moved deeper into the mountains, the road became a bit narrower and was basically just constant switchbacks as we wound our way up…and then back down to Chora Sfakion. We had a few near misses with goats that were wandering across the road as they grazed the mountainside.

Chora Sfakion is a tiny village that overlooks a small bay on the south side of Crete. It's known for being a place to stay if you are doing several of the hikes on this side of the island. When we arrived we were quite surprised to see that the hotel we booked was completely under construction!! I thought, maybe the upstairs is okay and it's just the restaurant and reception area that are under construction, surely they wouldn't have booked us a room without actually having one!? We asked a construction worker and he got on the phone, he asked us to wait for 10 minutes while someone else came. We decided to just talk to one of the other hotels while we waited to see what they were like…it was pretty minimal, so we decided to see what the person I had originally booked with had in store for us before making a final decision. We went back and Yiannis had arrived and explained that they were supposed to open April 1. Clearly that wasn't going to happen since they didn't have electricity yet! So he took us to a room around the corner in a different hotel and gave us a breakfast voucher from yet another hotel. So, definitely not what we were expecting, but luckily we are only here for one night, so we figured we could make do.

Given that it was a beautiful day, we decided to sit at one of the restaurants on the water and have something to drink while we read and played cards for a while. After a couple of hours we walked two doors down for some gyros, and then walked a couple more doors down for some delicious dessert! There are only about 8 restaurants in this town and we have already managed to go to 3 of them and we'll hit another one up tomorrow morning for breakfast!

One of the hikes we were considering is partially washed out from the storm they had here in February and while it's passable it sounds like there is a lot of treacherous climbing with sheer rocks into the sea…something I think I'd rather avoid! So tomorrow we are going to try to hike Imbros Gorge and see how that goes instead, wish us luck!

Keely