Gramvousa and Balos Lagoon

Before I even start typing, I'll be honest. Today is July 2. So our last two days of our wonderful learning experience will be typed as truly in the past as they are now just memories, but memories that will be with us for always.

Tuesday was our last full day and our last day on Crete. We booked a tour, but nothing like the Samaria Gorge. It was called Gramvousa and Balos Lagoon. There was a photo I found when I first googled Crete and I needed to find the location and take the picture myself. How did I do?

Googled photo:

My photo:

Needless to say, we were definitely in paradise for the day.

Our day started by being picked up at 8:30 by another large charter bus. I had already checked out our route so I knew that we were not going to be climbing any mountains or taking any sharp turns over cliffs. However, we were the first two on the bus which meant we had to go along for the ride to fill the bus with other excited lagoon-goers.

Cue TCW. One thing that we learned during the workshop was how to observe and turn ordinary into extraordinary through creative thinking. We took this time to really examine the people boarding our bus and created stories for them. It's fun to do, and I look forward to implementing this in my classroom as a creative writing activity.

We traveled by bus to Kissamos to meet the ferry. Then we traveled for 1 hour on a ferry along the inlet coast to our first stop: Gramvousa. We stopped and disembarked to explore the small island. From there we got back on the ferry for a 20 minute VERY ROUGH ride to Balos Lagoon. Here is a map of our route. This is the western most part of Crete.

The calm waters were inside the inlet, while it was quite rough on the outside. On the short trip from Gramvousa to Balos, I got seasick (any and all of my students could tell you that Mrs. Kirchberger gets motion sick..I make a big deal out of a quiet bus ride on field trips and I only sit in the very front seat!)

Gramvousa was beautiful. there was a fortress to climb up to, however if you'll remember what our day was like the day before, there was no way we were going up (or down) anything. 

Here are a few photos of Gramvousa:




Here are a few photos of Balos Lagoon:









 Two more of Gramvousa:


The Flag of Greece flying on the back of our ferry:

Although we were both quite tired after the day's events, we went out to eat on our last evening in Crete. It was a beautiful cafe as they all were.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Day In Athens...

Image
Going into this day I sang "this is the day that never ends....it will go on and on my friend!!" Lambchop anyone?! What was that show??? After dinner the night before we still had to pack, so we didn't get to sleep until about midnight, Greece time. We woke up at 4:45 am. Boarded the short flight to Athens at 6:15 and landed at 7. by 7:15am we were in our private taxi car with our driver, Spiros. George's Taxi Tour was the company we hired for this day tour and we are so thrilled that we did. Spiros spoke English and took us to all of the must see spots in the time we had.  Here are a whole bunch of photos from our day. Make sure to scroll all the way down!  A summer camp of students walking down the street:  The Stadium: We returned to the airport at 2:30pm and boarded our long flight to New York at 5:30pm, still Greece time. Then we flew for 10 hours! I only slept for about 2 hours on the pla
Read more

Samaria Gorge

Image
We knew before we came that we would have two full days on Crete after TCW so we booked two excursions: The Samaria Gorge and Gramvousa and Balos Lagoon. On Monday, we did the Gorge. Here is a good site with all the information you would need about the hike:  https://www.west-crete.com/samaria-gorge.htm Our day started at 5am. We had ordered a wake up call from the front desk just in case. I was surprised that I popped out of bed as soon as it came through. I guess I was excited!  Since breakfast wasn't going to be open before our bus came at 6:10am, our hotel packed us a breakfast package. Really it was a Samaria Gorge package that included a banana, water, and two foot long baguette sandwiches. They definitely came in handy and were really quite good! Our bus picked us up in front of the hotel and was already full. We were the second to last pick up that morning. The bus was a regular size charter bus:  I was certainly not prepared for the ride up the mountain. Th
Read more