Heraklion; Monday, 12 June, 2017

Breakfast completed, and my bag packed I wandered down to the bus station to pick up an early morning bus out to Knossos. I’d read that the site can get busy early so I wanted to be there before many of the tour parties arrived, and even having set off early it was still pretty busy when I got there, particularly for tickets. Thankfully I’d purchased a joint ticket at the Archaeological Museum the previous day so I was able to skip the worst of the queue and head straight into the site.

I spent most of the morning looking round the site, and trying to avoid the growing coach and cruise parties that were going around – each on much faster tours than I was doing. By the time I got to the end of the recommended itinerary it was getting difficult to actually see any of the site for the mass of humanity crawling over it.

Thankfully I had managed to see most of the site, which was more than the several hundred-people standing in the sun in the very long queue for tickets were likely to, so I was pretty happy with that.

I’d just missed a bus back into town so I popped into a café near the bus stop for a coffee and some water, and to pass the time, before I picked up a later bus back into Heraklion.

Back in the city centre I headed back to the hotel, picked up my luggage and did a bit of strategic repacking, before heading back to the bus stop to pick up the bus out to the airport.

I checked in and wandered through to the small, and sparsely served departures lounge at Heraklion airport, which I thought I would only be in for about 90 minutes before my flight left.

2 and a half hours later, and nearly 45 minutes after the flight was originally due to depart they finally started boarding, which was thankful as the time to make my connection in Athens was being eaten into.

In the end it didn’t matter too much as Check-in for my London flight had only just opened by the time I’d landed, been bussed to the terminal, collected my luggage and made my way back upstairs to departures and for the second time of the day through security and into a departures lounge.

I didn’t have as long a wait in the lounge at Athens as my BA flight was on time all the way back to London, though the lack of staff at Heathrow meant it took another 30 minutes from getting to the gate before the airbridge was attached and we could actually get off the plane.

Bags collected I wandered out into arrivals in time to meet my pre-booked taxi back home.