Day 16: couch surfing the right way

Trip

Greece+Cyprus 2025

Location

Crete 🇬🇷

Date

September 28, 2025

We had planned a do-nothing-day ahead of hiking the Samariá gorge tomorrow. It’s our last two full days in Crete before flying to Cyprus for the last leg of our trip: spending the last day hiking a gorge seemed fitting.

The day started with breakfast at 📍Baron Brunch Coffee Bar. It has a long ass name but other than that it does good coffee and OK food. They do the American style omelet and the standard yogurt bowl one can find everywhere. In every place we stay the night I research the best specialty coffee in the area. In this case I was told that Baron’s coffee reviews were good but if I really wanted specialty coffee I either needed to go back to Chania or redefine specialty coffee as any coffee since, you know, each individual bean can be special to someone in some way. Well… that’s not exactly how Google and Perplexity phrased it but that was the gist of it. Tough, but fair. The coffee was, nevertheless well executed. The performance was good enough that we’ll be returning tomorrow.

From there we walked to the periphery of the town to scout out the best sun-bed and sea-view-couch we could find. If you’re wondering what a sea-view-couch could be and how it differs from a sun-bed by the actual sea, well that’s simple. The sun-bed you rent for the day and it’s your own special place to lie down and pass the time. The sea-view-couch is a set of couches the bar running the sun-bed renting operation puts on the edge of its terrace at the back of all the sun-beds but doesn’t charge you directly to sit in it. Instead it’s coffee shop rule: order something regularly or make space for somebody who will.

We had a couple of small errands to run. Once those done we went to the best couches we could find at 📍Zephyros Beach Bar, we plump down, ordered some water and coffee and proceeded to couch surf the afternoon away. Get it? Sitting in a couch by the surf: couch surf. Some might say the fact I had to explain it makes it less funny but I say it’s just part of the experience. Also, my kind of couch surfing comes with cats.

Towards the end of our couch surfing session, the driver we had hired to bring us to the start of the gorge tomorrow informed us that the park would be closed so we won’t be able to do the hike we planned. We were bummed for sure but after spending a day completely relaxing it’s hard to feel too down. A thunderstorm and rain warning that comes with the possibility of up to a centimetre of rain could be a challenge for a gorge I guess. We didn’t want to do another couch surfing day. Like beach days, couch surfing days must be used sparingly as to prevent boredom. Like our host told us, there isn’t much to do around here and with the car making weird noises we really only want to use it to make our way back to the airport

Some research and a snack of grilled pork later, we concluded that we should return to Chania a day early. It’ll relieve the anxiety of a car breakdown when we have a flight to catch as we’ll have an entire day to get things settled if it happens and there will be more to do in the bigger city. We did miss out on the museum of pots (also known as the Archeological Museum) last time. Also, it’ll be warmer in Chania and we’re nothing if not fans of warm weather.

Bookings done, plans changed we went back to the apartment to decompress from the day of relaxing. We waited for dinner time to come around and stopped by to get our ferry tickets reimburse on the way there.

Dinner was at 📍Methexis. A casual but popular restaurant near the beach on the rocky side of the peninsula. A casual operation with good service, where we had a local fish, some Greek salad (fiber is important), cheese pies (because Karine loves her cheese course) and zucchini croquettes which are essentially grated zucchini mixed with some mint and cheese rolled in breadcrumbs and fried (delicious).

Overall we like Paleochora, it’s a nice chill town to base yourself out of when exploring the south side of the island. It has an healthy cat population which is a plus in our book.