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.
But here was the bummer — we hadn't even stood in line for twenty minutes when the gas station workers announced that they were out of gas. I walked back with a smart look on my face, showing the tourists standing in line a cross with my arms — I couldn't think of a smarter sign. A couple of Greeks even tried to talk to me in Greek, but they were out of luck, hehe, because I just kept answering them like a broken record, “no fuel”, “no gas”. Definitely not locals — the locals have known for a long time that a strike is a fun vacation, and you shouldn't kill your fellow countrymen's relaxed vibe. But tourists — they are fair game, they have nowhere to go anyway, after all, Crete is an island. I did, by the way, chat in passing with a young Dutchman on a scooter, who didn't impart anything useful but just pulled a concerned face. But he spoke English perfectly and clearly. As we know, the hodja looks for his ring not where he lost it, but where it's light.
Eventually, we had no choice left but to call the number listed in the car rental agreement. Fortunately, Andrey had a phone with roaming (he listens to audiobooks on his phone and thus drags it around with him), and on top of that, the relaxation virus hadn't yet gotten to the guy on the other end of the virtual line. So he informed us that five kilometers from Kavros there was a working gas station where they would serve us. But Kavros was in the opposite direction from where we were, closer to the city of Chania, meaning out west. Praying that we had enough juice left, we dashed back along the national highway, and then into the mountains, to look for the gas station. A seller in a local joint, looking like a Turk, informed us that the coveted barrels of gas were nearby, but the station was closed and we wouldn't be served. At this point I started to suspect something, and my suspicions were resolved in a lucky way for us: the station was indeed closed, and a father and his 13-year-old son were lazily sitting near the pump, taking a full minute to give birth to the phrase “Everything will be here tomorrow”. No, that wasn't the lucky part, the lucky part was that one call from our car rental buddy suddenly solved the problem — and for some reason we were getting filled up with Shell's signature premium-class fuel. If I haven't mentioned it yet, the station was a Shell. By the way, do you know what it’s actually been called for the past 80 years?
Royal Dutch Shell, meaning Royal Dutch Seashell. No, this time I'm not joking. By the way, Shell is the third largest company in the world, after the evil mega-corporation Wallmart and ExxonMobil of unknown levels of evilness. Shell itself tries to look nice — on Euronews there are always ads about how they support the development of alternative energy sources and care about the environment, creating an innovative super oil rig instead of a hundred small ones. I readily believe it — especially if these sources become available exactly when the oil starts to run out, and they will be provided by, once again, the Shell corporation. And caring for the environment, when at the same time it results in cost savings — why not? Especially when the latter is the cause, and the former is the effect.
Having successfully gassed up, we realized that now we were actually closer to the city of Chania than dragging ourselves back to Rethymno, and then to Heraklion. Along the way we discovered two more amusing facts. The fuel was running out not because it was leaking, but because the tank of our mega-ride was a mere 30 liters. By the way, “to go take a piss” in English is go take a leak, the last word also meaning a leak. By the way, in theory, I understand the rental guys — a tourist is still going to ask for a full tank when renting, and will return it empty. We buy a car with a 30-liter tank — voila, problem solved, because full became almost equal to empty. If anyone's unaware, a normal tank in a car is 60-70 liters, even in tiny things like ours it's usually at least 40. But a bitter aftertaste remained anyway: ripping off tourists is only good when it's not so obvious.
The second amusing fact: five km away from the first “Shell”, we encountered a second one. And it was open. Talk about luck and good timing.
And in the next part there will finally be stuff about Chania.