The beautiful town of Chania is located to north-east, oops, sorry, north-west, oops, sorry, I meant to say the stunning city of Chania is located and all that. If anyone didn't get it, that was a recursive oops, sorry. If anyone still didn't get it, it's not my fault, because I've been watching too much House M.D., my brain is tying itself in knots.
Anyway, I promised to tell you what unpleasantness happened to us after Rethymno. As we know, reading about the unpleasant, the weird, and the downright perverted is always way more interesting, even if many people won't admit it. Because who cares about something normal and prosperous? That's boring! (House is creeping in again, yikes).
So I’ll satisfy your curiosity. The thing is, when we rented the car, Tanya was told something about tomorrow being a “special day” and that gas would only be available at select stations. In principle, when we were driving to Rethymno, the gauge showed plenty left, so we weren't particularly worried. (He who eats the leftovers is clean and smooth — according to a Polish proverb). But just as we had made up our minds to head from Rethymno to Heraklion, the needle suddenly crawled briskly downwards, which threw us into a bit of a stupor. "We’ve got a leak!" I wanted to say, like the helicopter pilot from the latest episode of Lost, but something stopped me. It was probably the thought that we’d get stuck in the middle of the highway tens of kilometers from the hotel if we didn't urgently find a gas station. The problem was that there were no open gas stations along the road! We were looking carefully, you can be sure of that. In some bewilderment, we stopped near an auto center, where some older ladies called over a young girl, who informed me with some regret: They’re on strike!
In my native (unfortunately, probably) Russian language, this means: “They are striking”. That's when I recalled that a couple of articles I had skimmed through before flying to Crete mentioned that striking gas station workers are a local attraction, much like olives. Here you’d probably laugh, remembering the relaxed vibe, but for us, believe me, it was no laughing matter. Somebody did end up tipping us off on where to find a working gas station. In principle, we could have guessed it ourselves by the long tail of cars and motorcycles sticking out along the street.