Day 9 Sunday Impros Gorge

Today our original plan was to visit some beaches.  That all changed when we found out beaches are now closed in Greece.  Wendy really wanted to do a Gorge hike, the famous Samaria Gorge is not open this time of year because of flash floods, but the Imbros Gorge sounded good and it is only about a 1 hour drive away.  So we start off with a scenic drive to the gorge.

We see many people out gathering wild plants and herbs today

Lots of signs have been used for target shooting, and lots have graffiti on them.  What I really disliked was there were road signs with an arrow which way to go to a city, but no notification of how far the city was

For Jill, if she ever reads this...

We got to the gorge, we were the only car parked, I hope we don't have to walk both ways.

Beginning of gorge walk, 11km in total, thank goodness it isn't all this rocky.  The starting point is 2,000 ft higher than the end, all downhill walk

Only railing we saw the entire hike

Not sure of the significance here, but we placed rocks too, seemed like the thing to do?

Gorge got to 2metres wide at the narrowest point

we wondered how many more years before this tree would come down

There was this small cabin part way down, with a pen for sheep, both were empty

Anyone see a face here?

End of the hike.  We asked some guys that were working on a restaurant if they knew a taxi, they called someone for us, 25Euro to get a ride to the top.  It was a longer very windy road, would not have wanted to walk it.  This guy serenaded us on the way up, was very glad to get out and sanitize our hands!

We walked down the gorge straight, this was the road that we came back up by taxi

Lunch time again we had a hard time finding anywhere open.  We came across a tiny supermarket, wanted to buy a bag of chips but no one was there, so just left 1EUro on the counter.  Out in the parking lot and this kid comes running up the street, said my father isn't in there.  We told him we left 1Euro on the counter and off we went

Valley was so green at our lunch break.  A bakery with chocolate croissants to go with our bag of chips, after our 11km hike, we are good to go

More gatherers on the side of the road

Next we drove to Kournas Lake as it was on our way home and it was still early.  Again no one here, but you can see how busy it must be in the summer time

We came across another church on the drive out in Gerami, one more church today.  It is at a very pretty spot with a few locals around having picnics, and one person was in swimming.

One last stop at a lookout point over Rethymno.  It looks so big in this picture, but we are staying in old town which is a small section right by the harbour.

Off to find some supper and forecast for rain tomorrow so want to get a bit more exercise in.  The streets are pretty much empty, so sad, just a few days ago these places were full of young people having fun

There was some kind of Olympic ceremony going on.  Not sure what it was all about.  Maybe a crowd of 20 there, and there must have been 20 cops around, some of them in full riot gear.  We sat on our balcony and had supper after and listened, it went on for about 3 hours, and never any crowd.  

supper, take out only, we picked up 2 Gyros  and a litre of "draft" wine for under 10 Euro, crazy

This is the first time we have seen people in masks, not sure how good it works like this.  You are worried about the virus, yet you smoke and you are about 2 feet away from the other person.  The woman only put on her gloves and mask when she opened up the door for some renters, the other guy is the pharmacist across the street from us

Our street is closed to traffic on Sundays, but it is easy to lift the sign and go through for locals.  This is one of the 20 cops for crowd control.  This shot is taken from our front balcony

After supper one more walk, then call it a night.