On the move again!

I’ve moved into a new apartment! Yay! Bigger than our previous place, which means plenty of space for my family to expand 😀

We started talking about moving some time last fall, and for a while we thought we might be moving into a huge apartment that was just down the street, which would have been great, but that fell through just after the new year. Still determined to move, The Girl then started looking at ads, The Boy made the phone calls, and we went to look at four or five apartments during the following week. We settled on the last one we saw, and ten days after we started looking, we had a new place to live 😀

A friend with a car helped us drive things over to the new apartment, and he also came with us to IKEA, where we got all the boring necessities like shelves and a new bed… but most importantly, this:

The BEST nightlight 😀

At first the new apartment was pure chaos. We didn’t have enough boxes to pack stuff in during the first round of moving, so a lot of things were just dumped in a pile on the floor… Someone has a lot of books and board games and yarn 😛

But after we got some new shelves up it started looking really good 🙂 Got a new spot for the family as well:

Prime spot for the whole family in the living room so we can watch all the movies on TV 😀

I think we will be very happy here 😀

 

The Tall Ships are in town!

This year Bergen was one of the stops of the Tall Ships Race, which was very exciting. The Girl and I saw the ships a few years ago when they stopped by Ålesund, but unfortunately all the glorious photos of me from that event are gone 😦 So this year was an opportunity to take new ones! 😀

The ships started arriving as early as Friday, but Sunday was really the start of the event. The people were working all weekend, so when we went downtown on Sunday afternoon, most of the speeches and other opening events were over. Some of the ships had closed for the day because they were restaurant ships, and you had to buy tickets, which were long since sold out. But we still got to see all the ships, and got onboard two of them. One from Oman, and the other from Russia, called Mir. Like the space station 🙂

Onboard the Shabab Oman, with a view across the harbor to Mir (with the blue stripe) 🙂

Do you read Russian? 🙂

I have the wheel 😀

There were food stalls and souvenir shops all along the harbor, and the people went a little crazy and bought massive amounts of fudge!

So many flavors 😀

After we had seen all the ships, we needed to rest our feet, and we stopped for dinner at a very fancy restaurant. We couldn’t decide what to get, so we ordered a little bit of everything 😀

Lots of small dishes! Whale meat, lamb, cheese, soup & bread. All very tasty 😀

This was a fun day 😀 I think the people felt this whole event was a little too hectic and crowded, but I had a great time. Tomorrow the ships will be leaving, but again the people will be at work all day, so we won’t get to see them sailing… But I hope the Tall Ships come back soon so we can do this again 😀

Last day and a long journey home

Wednesday was our last day on Crete. It was also May 1st, so many things were closed, and we decided to just relax and take our time with packing and getting ready for the trip home. There was a huge airline strike going on, which meant that our domestic flight was canceled, and we didn’t want to risk being stuck in Oslo, so the people got tickets for the night train from Oslo to Bergen instead.

Lazy breakfast outside 🙂

After a late breakfast and some boardgames we started packing. Later we went to a pub for dinner, which was very good. They played cool music and everything, and we wanted to stay there for a while, but we had to go to sleep early to get on the bus the next morning. Boo

Last supper in Crete. Burger and souvlaki 😀

Early yesterday morning the bus picked us up and took us to Heraklion airport, where we got on the plane without any issues. The plane even left a little early!

Last view of Crete and the Mediterranean! For now 😛

Sadly, the flight was full of screaming children that the parents seemed to have abandoned, and the noise was ridiculous. We partly solved the problem by getting headphones and watching the in-flight movie, which was Bohemian Rhapsody. It was great 😀

Movie time 😀

Our meal for the flight: the smallest tortilla chips I’ve ever seen! 😀

Full control of the emergency exit 🙂

In Oslo we were picked up by The Boy’s mother and sister again, and we had dinner with them before they drove us to the train station. We stashed our luggage in lockers and wandered around for a few hours while we waited for the train to be ready so we could get on. It was a very long night…

Killing some time at a pub in the train station…

The train left at 11:30 at night and arrived in Bergen at 7 in the morning. Luckily we did get some sleep, because The Boy had to go to work!

All tucked up on the train with our sleep masks 🙂

Night night!

Traveling is a lot of fun, but also exhausting… I think I will need a nap before I start telling the family about all our adventures on Crete. But the new kid has been introduced to the rest of the family, and we have decided that he will be called Lumpy 😀

Road trip!

Some of the things we wanted to see on this holiday were in places that buses don’t regularly go to, so we decided to just rent a car and drive there ourselves. We rented a neat little Fiat Panda from a travel agency right by our hotel, and set off a little over 10 in the morning, armed with maps, snacks and GPS 🙂

First stop was an open air site at Eleftherna, where we were pretty much the only visitors. High up in the mountains and the roads there are narrow and winding, plus they don’t really put up too many signs around here, so maybe people just didn’t know about it.

The area was fenced in, but the gate wasn’t locked…

Wandering around in the overgrown ruins of ancient Eleftherna

A storage shed with stuff

Lots and lots of artifacts from the site, just sitting on the shelves…

Remnants of an old basilica

Climbed a gnarly old tree 🙂

And then we had to wait for a flock of sheep to cross the road before we could leave 😀

There is a new and fancy museum about the site, but it was closed, of course. Every Tuesday, which is not mentioned anywhere We stopped for lunch at a taverna across the road, which had a glorious view down the hills to the coast 🙂

Feta and bread, of course 🙂

The view!

From Eleftherna we drove to Melidoni and visited a famous cave. People lived in it thousands of years ago, but now it is just a tourist destination. The deepest parts of the cave were closed off, but we got to see the main room, with lots of amazing stalactites and stalagmites 😀

Ready for some spelunking! 😀

Going down the 80 steps from the entrance to the bottom

All lined up 🙂

After the cave we ate some ice cream before we continued on our road trip. The next stop was a reptile park that we happened to pass by on the way up to the cave, because The Girl really wanted to see some critters. When we entered, we expected to have a look at snakes and lizards in their terrariums, but instead we got a guided tour that included handling of several of the animals. The Girl was ecstatic to say the least 😀

Leopard gecko. So soft and cute 😀

A baby corn snake!

Milk snake 🙂

Ball python 😀

A boa constrictor that just wouldn’t hold still for a picture 😛

Giant snail!

A very fat leaf frog 😀 We had to be careful with this one so it didn’t get scared and pee on us…

And finally, a bearded dragon 😀

After all the snake handling we continued to the next post on our trip, the Sfendoni cave. It was bit to drive, and we only got there about ten minutes before closing and feared we wouldn’t get to see it. It’s bigger than Melidoni and has several branches, so you are not allowed to enter without a guide. Luckily there were still so many people that wanted to go in that they decided to give one last tour! It was very quick, but we did get to see all of it 😀

In the cave!

Fancy light 😀

After a very quick round of souvenir shopping we got back in the car and headed home to Rethymnon. It took just over an hour to drive back, and we delivered the car at around 19:00, one hour before closing. Almost like we planned it 😛 We went to the hotel with our things, and then we went out to dinner.

Rabbit and chicken 🙂

Only one more day before we go home! Will be good to see the other hogs on the shelf again 😀

Santorini!

Today we visited Santorini, the island also known as Thera, two hours by boat north of Crete. We had to get up at 5 in the morning to get on a bus to Heraklion and take the boat from there.

Land ho! First view of Santorini 🙂

Thera used to be a much bigger island, but most of it collapsed after a huge volcanic eruption around 1600 BC, so now it looks like a sickle, with a few smaller island forming almost a ring around a huge crater filled with water, called a caldera. The eruption left no one alive on the island, but later people came back to live here, and most of the cities on the are placed on the cliffs and hilltops, high up from the water.

Going up the hills from the port. So high up!

Spotted a lizard from the bus! Can you see it? It made The Girl’s day 😀

First the bus took us to Oia, the town on the top of the hills with the white buildings with blue domed roofs. We walked around for a bit and found an old fort with a great view of the town, but didn’t see too many of the blue roofs

View of the caldera from the center of town

View from the fort. Notice the volcanic rocks in the wall I’m sitting on… The Girl sure did 😀

Another view. If you look closely you can just make out a few blue domes over there…

Pretty cactus! Santorini actually has no ground water, and it rains very little in the summer months. The water they now get from turning sea water into fresh water is expensive, so water is precious and they don’t use too much if they don’t have to… Can you imagine?

Crunchy snail on a pretty flower 😀

The island was surprisingly green and lush when we visited. Usually it would have started to turn brown by now, but this last winter was particularly bad with a lot more rain than usual, so the plants are still alive

We had to stop and get ice cream, because the midday sun was murdering the people. I was nice and cool in a bag the whole time and only had to come out for pictures, but The Boy and The Girl had to stand in the shade and eat ice cream for a while before we could continue our walk through the town…

Of course I found a tree to climb 😀

From Oia the bus continued to Fira, which is the capital on Santorini. It’s a much bigger city than Oia, with street names and everything 😛 We visited two museums, but the second one felt pretty much like an extension of the first. It was very small; good thing we got in for free 😀

Cycladic figure in the Prehistoric Museum

Fancy dagger!

Boar heads. How do you do, fellow hogs? 🙂

Shiny goat!

We had to search a while to find the second museum in Fira, it was hidden away in a backyard and we had to navigate some really narrow streets to get there. There were very few signs, and the map we found showed it in the wrong place…

Found a beetle while looking for the other museum. So nice and round and crunchy 🙂

Great big jar with pictures of someone in a chariot drawn by pegasuses. Pretty cool 😀

Pretty painted figure of a woman doing her hair 🙂

While waiting for the bus to take us back to the boat, we stopped by a pub to pass the time and escape the heat. I got lots of new fans!

Back on the bus we learned that the boat was late, so we had time for one more stop, in a small village called Pirgos. We didn’t go far from the bus, so we didn’t get to see much, but we did say hello to some cute donkeys 😀

And a mule 😀

Donkeys are done for the day 😀

At the port we waited for the boat some more, and it finally arrived, almost an hour late It took almost 2.5 hours to get back to Heraklion, and from there another 1.5 hours to Rethymnon. Now we are back at the hotel and it’s over 11… We have great plans for tomorrow, but we will see 😛