The group was awakened at 8:00 as I was getting out of the shower. I was the first one down for breakfast which I shared with a horde of Germans. We left the hotel by 9:15. Not far from town is the Minoan Royal Villa at Ayia Triada. Like Phaistos, it must have been very elegant in its day. I had brought my compass to measure any possible orientations of earthquake damage. On a lark, I took the strike of one of the Ashlar walls and found that it aligned exactly with magnetic north! This proved to be the case throughout the old and new palace phases. This touched off a flurry of excitement so after finishing at Agia Triada, Anne, Bob, and I returned to Phaistos and found identical orientations. This might suggest that the Minoans used a compass! This was thousands of years before Marco Polo brought it back from China .

Next we drove to Gortyn where the oldest western legal code is inscribed in marble slabs on the walls of a Roman theatre. It is Greek Law that the Romans hung in the theatre to preserve; it's still there. There is also a Byzantine basilica that is partially preserved. I stubbed my toe really hard walking over to it; I'll lose a toenail. We had gyro pita sandwiches for lunch in a nearby town whose name we couldn't find on any signs. We kind of overwhelmed the owners at first but they recovered and we had an excellent meal.

Next we drove to the sacred Skoteino Cave that is entered through a sink hole on a high polje. We passed a wind power generation station on the way. The cave is 160 m deep. Most of the students went to the bottom with Anne where they found pottery shards. I stayed at the second of four levels with Eric and Ryan enjoying the cool air.

From the cave we descended to the coast town of Hersonissos which was a fairly hopping place, and stayed at the Blue Island Hotel. I had a room with an ocean view down one block. I wrote on the balcony for a while and then went to an internet café which actually served coffee, and did my email. I did some Google research and discovered that the present magnetic declination of Crete is about 2° and was 91/2 ° at 1000 BC. The wall orientations might be oriented to the North Star instead of magnetic north! I also looked up the nearby site of Mallia which Anne and I will visit tomorrow.

I couldn't find anyone at the hotel so I went out to dinner by myself at a place up the street. I had excellent fried calamari. I drank about 2/3 of a bottle of wine so I brought the rest back to the hotel and finished it as I wrote. I went to bed at midnight and quickly drifted off to sleep.