Phaistos

Saturday ramble and we met up with Dave and David who were sitting painting part way round our route - subject = a deserted village on the opposite hillside.

Day trip to Phaistos - a Minoan palace on the south coast of Crete. This is the view from the entrance - they had this sort of vista 360 degrees from the palace.

A lot of ruins have been excavated but not reconstructed as they have at Knossoss so a  more realistic idea of how it was.

A diagram of the Phaistos stone that was found here (now in the Heraklion museum - see later) This is written in a script known as Linear A and has still not been deciphered. 

Beehives out on the hillside on our walk from Phaistos to the villa 3km away. We hadn't intended walking there but.... when we came out of the palace "someone" managed to lock the keys in the car! As we were about 2 hours from the car hire office we had quite a wait for them to drive over to us with a spare key - whoops!! Still, looking on the bright side,

 we did have a wonderful walk which we wouldn't have done otherwise!

The following week a trip to Heraklion museum to see all the frescos and treasures from Knossos and Phaistos. Wonderful reconstructions of the frescos from original fragments - incredible to think these were painted nearly 4000 years ago!

If you zoom in you can make out the original fragments that they found and used to complete the fresco

Unfortunately, the section containing the Minoan treasures (including the Phaistos stone) that we had particularly come to see, was closed for renovation.

A view of the centre of Heraklion - a much sunnier, calmer day than when we were here in the boat on our way to Aghios Nikolaos.

Having fun in the Natural History museum where they had a temporary exhibition of optical illusions and holograms. We also went on an earthquake simulator which was interesting!

Thursday evening wine tasting at the sailing club. 14 bottles of wine (must be Greek and cost less than 7 euros) 30 people testing them and scoring them out of 5. Amazingly our bottle came second!! Jill and Paul on the right organised the evening - they used to run a chain of hotels in Nigeria and then Malawi. Paul started his career working as a chef at the Dorchester.