A Five-Ruin Day (if you count my innards and me separately)

Day 76; Friday, June 19

Well, here’s the little room in Myrtos



I had such an adventure in for a couple of hours early (1:30 until almost 4:00) this AM.

It’s a nice room, and here are a couple of views from the little balcony





But the big adventure was Phase I of totally swapping out all my intestinal flora (using both Mode A and Mode B) for a new batch, which I’m guessing I’m developing today. . . .

I was up in the mountains looking for ruins yesterday, and filled a water bottle in one of those fountains where it just flows clean and pure (?) right out of the hills.

And I figured that by day 75, I’d be safe.

Not even close.


More Minoans

If you don’t count the biological warfare battle I clearly lost, the day’s first shoot was at a little Minoan site about 2 Km from where I stayed.

Here’s the town from the ruins, for example



And here’s some more of the ruin.











And (this makes me a little nuts, which is whey I’m sure I keep mentioning it— there’s all these little treasures all over the damn place.

Here’s a little collection that (I’m guessing here, obviously) some one collected at the site recently, put on a flat rock, and then (perhaps) photographed.







And it would be so cool to have some of these little treasures—real things, made and used by real people, almost 4,000 years ago— that’s 160 generations.

But at least when I left them, about 9:00 AM today (it was already getting pretty hot), they were still all there.


More Minoan (open-air) Museums

Just up off the road, about 200 meters from the main coastal highway, was this great place---





And, once again, two more delicious artifacts---





(The round one is the handle of a pot or jar, I’m guessing)

And more than the two really great ones





The latter one is a metate, the trough part of what you grind wheat into with a little rolling-pin rock.

The more you have used it, the deeper it gets.

I kept looking at this one, wondering about the weight limit on carry-on bags. . . . .


Saw a couple more roadside shrines worth shooting alongside the road—this one is pretty good size— the bottom of the roof line is right at six feet from the street level.





Then I hit a Minoan country villa—

Here are the steps leading up into the place



Next stop was a great Roman acropolis— at Praissos









Here’s the view of the second acropolis below the first one—



I could see 71 wind turbines from up here on two different mountain crests.


And now I’m in Sitia, the NE corner of my jaunt around Crete.

I’ll be poking around here in the AM, then heading west starting about mid-day on Saturday.