The maps showed us that the Lató Boutique Hotel was an easy walk, making a taxi unnecessary. We wound up doing without the taxi, but the walk couldn’t be called easy—the two-dimensional maps hadn’t shown us that the hotel, which we could see from the bus station, looked down from a pretty high hill. (This picture, from the Lató's own site, shows the top couple of stories, but we were starting from a level not much higher than the cars you can see in the parking lot.) To get up there we had to haul our bags out of the bus station and down the road to a busy traffic circle, where after crossing, we found ourselves at the foot of a long public stair that had looked, on maps, like a street.

Only by way of a long detour perhaps tripling the length of the journey could we avoid the stairs. We spent a little time exploring to confirm that this was really so. While Dorothea watched our bags, I walked past a long, vaulted Venetian arsenalo that’s now cut off from the sea by the waterfront highway. The sidewalk was overhung by a narrow part of the vault of another arsenal that once stood next to it, but appeared to have been demolished in order to build the highway. (It’s possible, of course, that the rest of that building had fallen down, or been demolished in the bombing of 1941.)

I found no easy route in that direction, so we resigned ourselves and retraced our path to the foot of the stairs, where we resolved to take the ascent slowly (as if we could have taken it any other way). When we got to the top both of us were still breathing, and only a short haul remained to get us to the hotel.

As Dorothea’s notes record, the Lató was the most expensive hotel where we’d made reservations for the trip. Despite that, however, everything in it was fairly small—room, balcony, hallway, even the elevator—but the staff was friendly and welcoming, and as she also noted, commercial space is probably more expensive in Iráklio than anywhere else in Crete. When we were making plans, we weren’t sure we wanted a hotel with boutique in the name, but the location was attractive, and—once we had made it up the hill—it did turn out to be very convenient, an easy walk to most of the things we wanted to see in the city. (Even the public stairs weren’t much of an obstacle when we weren’t carrying a load of baggage.) And, unlike any of the hotels we’d stayed in up to then, it had free Wi-Fi access with a strong signal right in our room. Elsewhere, we’d always had to go downstairs to a public area. The Idéon, in Rethymno, had also charged €2 per hour for the connection, which, of course, didn’t always work. (This may have saved us a few euros, but that was hardly the point.)

The bus had let us off at 2:30pm, and it was getting to be late afternoon by the time we were settled into our room. We decided to forget lunch, and sat on our small balcony eating the second little bag of dried olives I had bought in the airport at Athens, along with some bread that Dorothea had intelligently saved from our last evening meal in Réthymno. Our luggage was now devoid of snacks.

At about 5:30 we walked a few blocks down Epimenídou street, which the hotel is on, to 25 Avgoústou, the main drag of the oldest part of town. It leads down a gentle grade to the waterside, and the last several blocks, where we walked, are restricted to pedestrian traffic. The sun was setting behind the mountains to the west of us—Iráklio being in an indentation of the north coast, there was land instead of water in that direction—and the wind was blowing pretty hard from the north. But although we couldn’t see the sun from where we were, it was shining on the clouds out in front of us, turning them pink and gold (with increasing bits of purple as the light continued to decline. The clouds were reflected on the surface of the waves just before they boomed and splashed on the rocks. “Chilly and buffeted” as Dorothea accurately recalls we were, we nevertheless spent a long time walking up and down the waterfront, taking pictures of this colorful performance. A large public promenade was nearly deserted, though we could see that tavernas and cafés had plenty of customers.

Near the southern end of the promenade, to our right, a sea wall (or more properly, a mole) extends outward to the northeast to define and protect the city’s harbor. A short way out, it widens and shelters the innermost section, almost but not quite meeting an extension of the shore. Together the widened mole and the extended shore form a narrow entrance and define the shape of the small round Old or Venetian Harbor. A fort originally built by the Venetians, who called it Rocca al Mare (‘Rock on the Sea’), stands guard on this wide part of the mole. Today it’s called the Koúle or Koúles, based on what the Turks called it. An online dictionary I checked said that the Turkish word can mean 'tower, gun turret, dungeon, gazebo, steeple.' The second and third definitions fit, in a way, though the others don't. Rather than speculate, I’ll just remind anyone who may have forgotten that I know nothing worth knowing about the Turkish language.

Beyond the fort the mole narrows again and extends for about another mile, bending alternately northeast and east, to protect a huge dock area that accommodates the many ferries and freighters required to support modern life on this large and populous island. The opening at the distant eastern end of the harbor is wide (about a thousand feet, if I’m interpreting the Google map rightly). Obviously, ships don’t have to negotiate a bottleneck to get in.

By 7:00 it was getting too dark outside to be interesting, and all the chilling and buffeting had given us an appetite, so we went to a restaurant on the traffic circle where 25 Avgoústou meets the waterfront. It was named the Ippókampos (“Hippocampus,” in the Greco-Latin used by zoologists and medical anatomists—both are relevant here because the Greek word means ‘seahorse,’ and the same name has been given to a part of the human brain because of its shape). Ippókampos describes itself as an ouzerí rather than a taverna, which should mean that it concentrates on serving that strong drink, ouzo, and provides food more or less as a sideline. But such distinctions are often ignored, and this ouzerí was well (and accurately!) reviewed as a good place to go for dinner.

Like nearly all restaurants it had a place to eat outside, but nobody was doing that. The front was closed, as it is in the picture (from the Web), though on warm days and nights the windows on both sides are folded back all the way to open the inside to the plaza in front. This night was by no means warm, and we knew that it was time to break our string of outdoor meals. We gladly joined the other customers, who included both locals and tourists, in Ippókampos’ interior dining space. We shared a horiátiki (‘village style’) salad, some kolokíthia keftédes (or zucchini croquettes), and saganáki. For a main dish Dorothea ordered regular keftédes (the meat kind) and I had grilled sardines. In our part of the world canned sardines are so universal that it’s hard to imagine eating fresh ones. I was surprised to find that they tasted pretty much the same, except less “canned”—by which I suppose I mean that they weren’t too oily. The bread basket, Dorothea remembers, “had an interesting variety”: paximádi of various shapes and kinds, some like little cookies, others like rusks, and others like crackers, plus both white and whole wheat breads. A half-bottle of retsina didn’t quite suffice, so we added a glass of house white.

The complimentary dessert was brownies with vanilla ice cream, a foreign delicacy from exotic America, although the grapes on the side were a slight surprise. To our great joy and gratitude, complimentary rakí was also put on the table: the taps of heaven had mercifully opened once again. I had begun to fear that we'd been blacklisted by some Cretan restaurateurs’ guild for violating a rule we didn’t know about—for instance, that diners should never consume all the free rakí they were given, but should leave, say, a third of the carafe to be taken back to the kitchen and reunited with the Mother Jug. But it seems that serving complimentary rakí is something that’s just not done in Réthymno. (Another possible explanation, I suppose, is that our visit happened to coincide with an industrial action by the rakí-distillers’ guild in that district.)

When we returned to the Lató, we found our bed turned down, and a plate of tiny díples—deep-fried pastries sprinkled with honey—as well as a little bottle of rakí left for us. Having had a comparatively bibulous dinner, we didn’t choose to open the bottle. We thought we might find a later occasion for that, but the restaurateurs of Iráklio were unanimous in seeing that we never went without the after-dinner gift of a little carafe—so the hotel’s bottle remained unopened. The maids probably thought we were teetotalers.

We had seen several reviews of Iráklio lodgings whose writers complained of being kept awake at night by the roar of jets from the airport, which is quite close to the city. It was about 1.3 miles or thereabout from where we were, a distance at which airport noises might have been audible, but we were never bothered. Perhaps this was because our room was on the side of the building away from the airport, or perhaps it was simply that the tourist season was coming to an end—this was the beginning of October, after all. Whatever the reason, we encountered no difficulty sleeping in peace and comfort, and that’s what we did.