Milos 2- By Nicole

Our second day in Milos started with going to rent a car so that we could explore the island. When we returned to Ioanna Pension, our host greeted us with "Potatoes! I give you potatoes!" We followed him to his field and he dug out a bunch of beautiful golden potatoes directly from the earth. He then proceeded to give us freshly picked lemons and fresh eggs from the chickens we could here clucking behind out room. We asked him how many cats he had – 25 – and then he announced: "I show you NEW cats!" and marched around a shed to proudly present 3 very cute little kittens guarded by their wary, one eyed momma. ("I show you new cats" became our phrase of choice for the rest of the trip!)
After oooh-ing and aaaah-ing over the kittens, we took off to explore the island. On the map, the island's roads are color-coded red (paved), yellow (not paved, bad condition – not allowed by our car rental company) and black (walking paths) so we headed toward Pollonia (red roads) to see what we might find along the way. After a few tries, we found one of the archeological sites marked on the map (Filakopi). What we also found there was an amazing little inlet carved into the soft sandstone cliffs – a sheltered little beach roped off in an attempt to discourage the curious from
climbing down to soft stone to the sand to peer out through the archway of rock separating the beach from open seas. Well, no one was there, so we climbed on down and took a look around! Very cool! All sorts of things carved into the sandstone walls and the water lapping gently at the beach.
After climbing back out before we were discovered, we checked out the archeological site – what to the uninformed looks to be carefully stacked rock walls among the undergrowth turned out to be the remains of a bronze-age Minoan town where some interesting pottery, statues and tablets had been found over the years. Not much the wiser, we returned to the car and decided to make crowns out of the local wild flowers: status. We picked our bunches and set off in the car in search of a suitable location to make our crowns. We found a little inlet half encircled by about 8 deserted summer cottages with a tiny fishing boat floating in the middle. It didn't look real – everything was so small and quaint it felt as if you had stepped into a fairy world. Perfect place to make our flower crowns!
We returned to civilization (Pollonia) crowned in our wreaths to find a place to eat lunch. We turned a lot of heads with our flower crowns, two of which belonged to the taverna owners where we decided to have lunch amid exclamations of "Brava!" and questions as to where we had out lovely wreaths. To the delight of the taverna owner, Sara wrote down our order in Greek and then we dined on some of the best Eggplant Imam, yummy fried baby calamari (I got to eat the tentacles because they were too icky for Sara), fresh Greek salad and decent white wine. This day was not even over and it was already my favorite day of this trip! What more can you want than beautiful sunshine, magical flower crowns, fun discoveries, lots of laughing with Sara (I show you new cats!) and really good food? I don't know – maybe what we did the rest of the day: got a little bit lost on the possibly not allowed yellow (unpaved) roads, picked wild sage and thyme while wondering what that buzzing noise was (we were really close to a rather large collection of little blue beehive boxes – one of the sources of the very delicious wild flower and thyme honey we had during our stay) and deciding to enjoy another delectable meal at the same taverna for dinner that night :-)
Our last morning on Milos, we made a wonderful breakfast of our hosts' edible gifts seasoned with fresh thyme from the hillside. We then relaxed for a bit after taking the car back (Sara schmoozed with the kittens and I took pictures of the room and ground so that I can rate this great place on Tripadvisor!) and then our host brought us to the ferry – next stop Sifnos!