I have looked upon the face of Agammemnon

In case there haven't been enough clues, yes I travelled last week.

Budget airline, as much as possible a budget, no-frills trip. On the other hand, high-tourist areas have their own particular ways; between lousy public transit options (means a lot of taxi rides) and hotel regulations that don't permit as much as a hot plate (means you eat out a lot) it did in the end cost more than I had hoped.

The archaeology and history and natural history was extremely informative. And it was a fun trip too. Which is good, because there's this dirty little secret about research; you don't tend to generate answers, so much as you generate new questions.

Two days in Athens, most of a week in Crete, centered on Heraklion with short side trips until a final day in Chania in the West. Some of the usual suspects, but no art museums, and few monuments that weren't Ancient (did stop by a few Venetian and Ottoman bits, for instance.)

In short, visited the Palace of Knossos, the Acropolis, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens with an incredible pottery and sculpture collection and probably the best collection in the world from Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae, the spanking new Acropolis Museum, and Tylissos, a fairly recent excavation of ruins dating back to the Minoans.

And I met some Kri Kri, in a rather dismal enclosure at an under-attended public garden.

I didn't have time to get to Mycenae myself, or hike the gorge or visit the high-altitude sites where there had once been Peak Sanctuaries. But I did get the chance to see walls and rooms and daily household ware close up, enough to get a real sense of weight and size and fragility and color. And stroll a bit around the hills getting some sense for the weather and moods and the modern ecosystem (how much are later species, invasive or otherwise, I do not currently know).

And I've been re-thinking a lot. About continuity of Cretan culture, the real meaning of the Minoan culture, the Mycenaean take-over, the Bronze Age Collapse, the so-called Greek Dark Ages and the so-called Greek Miracle. A lot about not just what we know, but how it works emotionally and nationalistically and what the good options are for a writer.

And, yeah, I almost bought a Cretan Lyre. (It ain't a harp -- it's a stick fiddle).