A Cretan restaurant we hope to try – Alatsi in Athens.
Using ingredients and recipes from Crete – sounds authentic and tasty – try it and enjoy at Vrasida no.13 near the Hilton hotel (phone 210 721 0501)

Snow fell “all at once” as it always seems to do….much of the country was snow-covered to some degree – including a late-to-work-because-of-the-snow Athens on Tuesday.
Mountains and hilltops over 300 metres were snow covered even in Crete. Crete received months of rain in a night and a day, causing temporary lakes to appear in some parts of Chania while some south and eastern areas saw little of the wet stuff.

Crete has had few rather cold days with daytime temperatures sometimes straining to exceed 6 degrees centigrade. Things, the meteorological soothsayers tell us, will start warming up on Thursday
Perhaps integrity will descend across the land on Friday….! Ho Hum.

At 1.34PM as I leaned over the table to select an article I had printed, the table started swaying. Glasses started clinking like a crazy crowd toasting the new year and not stopping, and, even the solid concrete reinforced building was shuddering like a quivering jelly beeing struck by a baseball bat.

That was the 15 or more, perhaps 20 second duration earthquake, the “Kythira Fault-line” as we shall call it.

Everyone and everything seems OK in Crete and we hope (and information so far suggests) in Kythira….even though Mitata village they lost their town square to the ravine upon which it perched precariously for eons.

The quake was felt from central Italy to Gaza and beyond.

But we were soon – life must be enjoyed – enjoying coffee in a cafe overlooking the sea, before the TV channels had even had time to muster any vaguely “interesting” footage of our trembler.

Well – let’s just use this opportunity to say hi, hello and welcome again, to the new year.

Happy New year. During January a select few new hotels and fine houses will be added to the CreteHotelRooms.com website and the SuperbGreece.com website , ready for your New Year visit.
Had you stayed for Christmas there was high quality white snow in the mountains and those on the Lassithi Plateau had a white Christmas.

The owners of CreteTravel.com and CreteHotelRooms/SuperbGreece had the best-tasting Christmas turkey in the world….as always! A visit just before Christmas to Thessaloniki was rewarding with the most hospitable shopkeepers, cafe and restaurant owners ready to show the world some of the more dazzling and most helpful pre-christmas spirit we have seen. Shopkeepers in Crete take note and learn for next year!

We aim to please. And we look forward to pleasing many more visitors to Greece this year than ever before….providing that “wow” factor, the great experience of having superb and expert help to choose that warm and perfect place to stay.

Whether you will tether the wagon or land in other ways in Greece or Crete this year or not, do consider every opportunity to offer good old fashioned honesty and live with true integrity, rationally and with sane reason and wisdom…and have fun on this faulty yet eminently enjoyable planet of ours!

A happy and rewarding new year to us all.