Europe fall 2018

The Palace of Knossos was a bust.  It was mobbed with tourists, including some very pushy tour guides.  The ruins were interesting but all the good stuff has been removed to the museum in Heraklion. One bit of engineering was interesting, though.  The Minoans, who first showed up in Crete about 6000 B.C., built the Palace around 1700 B.C.   By the time they built the Palace they were already experts in water and sanitation engineering.  You can still see the rain culverts that diverted water from the buildings to the edges of the palace grounds.  You can also see the sealed terra cotta pipes that brought drinking water from a source 10 miles away.  The Palace even had a system for flushing the commodes and carrying the waste far away.  Western Europe "discovered" all these things 3000 years later. Heraklion Archeological Museum The city of Heraklion is about 5 miles from the Palace of Knossos.  Most of the artifacts unearthed a...

That last picture of Ralph's looks fake.  It isn't.  That was the the view from our fabulous Athens Airbnb apartment. The inside of the apartment was not too shabby either. Athens is everything one expects from a big European city -- crowds, traffic, sidewalk cafes, good restaurants, and so on.  There are a couple of unusual elements, though.  For one, the city is so old and was developed so haphazardly that the streets and sidewalks are more chaotic than other places we've visited.  We walk around a lot when we're in a city and that's challenging in Athens.  The sidewalks come and go.  Sometimes a 2-foot wide sidewalk has a utility pole right in the middle, forcing pedestrians into the street.  Cars park on the sidewalks because there are no parking places.  Or cars simply stop and turn on their flashers, creating an instant parking place, much to the frustration of other motorists.  In many ways, Athens reminds me more of Mexico...