It’s hard to be disCRETE when it’s 100 degrees outside!

Perfect balmy beaches. Beautiful, happy people dressed in designer swimming suits. Sand that somehow doesn't find a way to work itself into every nook and cranny. Bathtub temperature salt water. Perfect weather.

This is what I imagined when I thought of anywhere in Greece, especially the Greek islands. When you read about Greece you might hear about their financial crisis, but you’re more likely to read about its picturesque beaches, the delicious gyros, or maybe the identical houses with blue roofs that lineup around the coasts. In retrospect, it’s no wonder I had such a deluded idea of Crete. The media wins again!

If you want the short version of the story I can say it in about ten adjectives: 1) hot 2) desert 3) expensive 4) poor 5) sandy 6) BEACHES! -- 7) rude 8) God 9) Forsaken 10) Island – Now, don’t get me wrong, I had an absolutely great time in Crete, it just simply wasn’t what I expected it to be. (This seems to be a recurring theme with me, huh?) With that glowing introduction, I’ll walk you through our time on what will henceforth and forever more be known as “That God-Forsaken Island.”

Ty and I booked this trip months in advance. Ty’s grandma traveled to Greece for her niece’s wedding years ago and she loved it. I think ever since Ty heard about it from Grandma Mary Beth he’d wanted to go. And hey, what girl doesn’t love the beach? So I booked it as an actual honeymoon for Ty and I, even though we’d technically been on honeymoon for about five months. Because we booked it before our horrible experience with Ryanair (read my Friday the 13^th post) we had booked the flight through Ryanair and couldn’t cancel it. We were scheduled to fly out of Dusseldorf (Weeze).

Brace yourselves for an insurmountable amount of stupidity.

First, since I booked my flight with Ty, and labeled myself as a “missus” Ryanair automatically changed my last name on the ticket to “Stelting.” (My legal name is still Hoss because of the cost a namechange incurs.) I tried to call Ryanair to sort it out, but guess what, the number wasn’t right on the customer service sight. When I finally found the right number, the customer service only spoke German. Luckily, I happen to know some Germans! Katja called them for me to help sort it out. Funny story about that: even German telephone center people don’t speak the right language. Katja said it was some Asian lady who could hardly speak German and could speak even less English. Of course. Anyway, Katja sorted it out for us, and I had to pay ten euros to fix Ryanair’s mistake. What else is new.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30 in the morning. That’s fine for someone with a car, but for two people who rely solely on public transportation, it poses a big problem. Most public transport doesn’t start until at least five o’clock in the morning, and with Ryanair we were definitely going to show up two hours early. That left us two options: 1) pay an astronomical price for cab fare, or 2) sleep at the airport. We chose to stay at the airport because we usually go to bed at midnight anyway and since we wanted to be at the airport at 4:30 we only would have gotten about three hours of sleep anyway. So, we load up our bags and get to Dusseldorf airport. We go to Ty’s favorite place and ask where the gate is for Ryanair. Long story short, Ryanair doesn’t fly out of Dusseldorf airport. It flies out of Weeze airport, but calls it Dusseldorf because it’s “in the Dusseldorf area.” If Weeze is close to Dusseldorf, then I’m Angelina Jolie. Weeze is fifty miles and a sixteen euro (one way) train ride from Dusseldorf. I was thanking my lucky stars we decided to stay the night at the airport.

Sleeping in an airport: not as absolutely horrendous as it could have been. Ty and I got a bench to ourselves, so we leaned against each other and fell asleep. At first it was difficult because I was worried someone would steal our stuff, but we wrapped our straps around our arms, and kept our really important items in our grasp. The only problem was it got really cold and I ended up using a skirt as a blanket and Ty had to put on an extra pair of pants. The plus side? The money we saved by not staying at a hotel paid for our train ticket to the airport. Yay us.

Of course I was unimpressed with Ryanair’s customer service, but the flight did what it was intended to do: we got to Crete. Finally. When I pictured Crete for some reason I imagined more vegetation. It looked more like New Mexico with shrubs everywhere and dry dirt. We made it to our hotel alright, and we were very pleased with our hotel. The woman who welcomed us the first day was really friendly and helpful. The best part of our hotel was the location: a two minute walk to the beaches that had lovely clear water. You can’t beat that, especially considering our hotel was only thirty dollars a night—the only cheap part of the trip! (Don’t ask me how much we paid for a 200 mL bottle of fifteen euro sunscreen.) That evening we went to the store, had ice cream cones, at supper, then went down to the beach for a walk. At night we ate our dinner on the patio by our room and listened to live music that was coming across the street. It was a really nice first day in Crete.

Here's a picture of my hubby by the beach. It was a beautiful place to go walking!

Much of our days followed the same way. We at sandwiches with meat, pesto, and feta cheese for lunch. After lunch we went to the beach.

Here we are at Iguana Beach. The chairs behind us usually cost to sit in, but if we went at night when the beach was "closed" we could sit in a chair for free.

After attempting to shower off sand we had spaghetti with red sauce and some bread for supper. We went to the store and bought these huge sundae cones that were absolutely delicious. The hot weather made them melt the perfect amount. Nothing says perfection like ice cream on a hot day. At night we sat outside (mostly in our swimsuits because we were pouring sweat 99% of the time) and listened to the music from across the street. One night, I made a special supper of shrimp and spaghetti, which is really impressive considering I’m from Kansas, and the closest I get to making fish is cheeseburgers. Our last day in Crete was really special because we went into town center for supper.

Town center was a really busy place. There were stores everywhere peddling anything from eight dollar "Raybans" or fishy pedicures.

Apparently the fish have saliva that disintegrates the dead skin on your feet. The fish get a perfect, stinky meal, and you have nice, soft, fishy feet. SCORE.

This is the side of the beach by city center.

Our supper was great. I tried quiche for the first time, and Ty had a really fishy pasta dish!

This is our meal complete with fishy pasta, smoked pork strips, quiche, Greek beer, and FREE water! Whoop whoop!

A little cheesy humor: pun intended.

Reflecting on the trip, I have to ask myself what the best part was. The answer? The conditioner! Just kidding, but I have to share about this conditioner. It was all in Greek, but it was literally the best conditioner I’ve ever used. Guys reading this think I’m dumb but they obviously haven’t been conditioned by their significant others to appreciate a good conditioner! (Ha, hair product puns. I could pun again, but I’d have to lather and rinse first! Ahhhh I’m hilarious.)

Warm fuzzy feelings about conditioner aside, our last day in Crete, I’m pretty sure we got extorted by a hotel employee. The last night in Crete we bought a bus ticket into town from the girl who was so helpful the first day and told her we were planning to use it early so we could go into the airport. The next morning, a male employee checked us out, and we asked him if he had any specific ideas about bus times. He said the bus doesn’t run before 7:00. (Strange, because in most towns the bus starts at five or six, but I let it go because Crete’s purely a vacation island.) We decided to take his word for it because the other hotel employees had been so helpful, and we said we’d just get a cab. The hotel had sent an email to us before we arrived saying it was about six or seven euros to take a taxi into town. This employee told us he would take us in for ten euros. Knowing this was too high, we told him we knew there were cheaper cabs, and he said no, now you’d pay ten euros because it’s before seven and they’re still using night prices. That’s the crappy part about being a tourist: he could have been genuinely trying to help us by telling all of this, or he could have just taken advantage of our lack of knowledge to make himself a few extra bucks. I’ll never know. But, since we had no idea how to even call a cab, or which cab company to use, or if one would even come get us, we took his word for it and he drove us into town. Despite my reservations, the trip was successful because we ended up in city center on time to take a bus to the airport.

We left Weeze, and made it back to Dusseldorf in time for our flight to Prague.