My friend Martin, who I met in Puerto Rico, invited me to join him and a couple of his German friends on their trip to Crete. We all met up together in Dusseldorf at Martin's. Rolf and Uwe arrived on their huge motorcycles and we all started preparing for our trip.Here is a shot of Rolf, Martin, and Uwe:

Unfortunately I had booked my flight on Olympic Airlines instead of Lufthansa which everyone else was flying. My flight was diverted from landing in Iraklion because of bad weather but the Lufthansa flight did land in Iraklion so I was stranded in a town called Hania without the rest of the guys (who were the only ones who could speak any Greek).

But we managed to contact each other and meet up the next day at a little town on the south coast of Crete called Soughia.This town was a delightful cluster of open air restaurants and little Greek guest houses pressed against the southern Mediterranean Sea. A seaside village that we usually see on a postcard and wish we could find in reality. It came to me that day that postcards in most tourist destinations show us pictures of our dreams for the place before we got there. So we seek them out like gems as replacement for our shattered fantasy. But Sougia seems like one of those little beach side towns, usually known only to a few, that might live up to the postcard billing.

The guys roared into town several hours after I had arrived by bus. They had rented their motorcycles in Iraklion (which I should have done as well if my flight had arrived in the right town).

On our second day in Sougia we made a full day hike to the nearby ancient Greek archeological site called Lissos. Here we are hiking up the gorge:

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