By Zeus!

It was 70 degrees and sunny today on the island of Crete, birthplace of Zeus. He was born in a cave. Maybe that's why he throws lightning bolts around; he expected better accommodations. I'll never know.

So much of Greece is unbelievably old and mythic that it's easy to believe in minotaurs, centaurs, and generations of mighty warriors who defended mountain passes against invaders.

This is a short report because we pretty much only did one thing: We hiked a gorge. It was created by an earthquake eons ago. Part of the gorge narrows to the width of two people who haven't been eating cruise food for a week. The Gorge of Imbrose commemorates the first line of defense against invaders coming over the mountain. Warriors and their families lived near the pass and fought fiercely. We fought fiercely against the thick, prickly gorse, loose rocks that wanted to eat our ankles, and low-growing trees that wanted to thwack us in our noggins. On the other hand, we were serenaded by Cretan nightingales almost the whole way down the mountain.

The guide was amusing. She said that on other islands, people had only to climb to the highest point and look around at the sea surrounding them to realize they lived on an island. Because Crete is pretty big and the mountains are pretty high, nobody realized they were on an island. Homer apparently took Crete's assertion at face value and wrote about the continent of Crete.

This is the report of someone who, like the blind men trying to describe an elephant, only saw one thing:

The continent of Crete smells like sage. It is dry and a little windy. It has a strange plant that I think the guide called a dragon blood plant. It is carnivorous and thus smells really, really bad. There is a tea brewed from a plant that grows in the cracks of the gorge's cliffs. It tastes like sage. Greeks put honey on everything. They are smart people.

I'm going to take a bottle of Advil now.

Caught between a rock and a hard place.

The awesomely awful dragon's blood plant.

A narrow passage

Another narrow place!

Our passage marked in red