Malta part 3

I'm sure most of you are hoping for some amazing stories of scuba diving and how amazingly clear the water is, and how much fun we had. Please don't hold your breath. We didn't go. Not that we didn't want to. We got up early, ate breakfast, got our gear and headed to the dive school. When we first walked in I could tell it wouldn't go well. The first thing the girl said was, "it's awfully windy out". As in, we don't want to take you diving if it is too windy. No problem. We talked about it and decided that we would do half today and half tomorrow when it was supposed to be less windy. Then came the filling out of all the forms. There was a medical form (the usual - history of heart disease, do you have epilepse, do you have any other dibilitating disease that we should know about etc.) And, of course, are you pregnant. Are you pregnant or is there ANY CHANCE that you could be pregnant. I had to put yes, since technically there is a chance that I could be pregnant. That threw up red flags all over the place and both instructors were dead set against me going underwater. Apparently there is a theory that diving harms a fetus, and since no woman in her right mind would allow you to test that theory on HER fetus, there is no definitive proof. Needless to say, I was grounded. Ryan probably could have gone, but what fun would that be if it was just him and not both of us? And here I thought this was a vacation to do what we wouldn't do once we had kids!! Boy was I wrong. Looks like scuba diving is out of the question for Egypt too. Snorkling maybe.

Anyway, since we were both so disappointed that we weren't diving we had to find something to fill our day. We decided to go down to Mdina (the silent city) and explore. You aren't allowed to take a car in, so we had to park and walk around. It was absolutely gorgeous. Very well preserved from ancient times, and they have all sorts of incentives to keep it that way. We walked around, visited the natural history museum (a waste of time and money) and the Mdina dungeons (kinda scary, and really really gorey). We had a nice day and finished it off going to the Dingli Cliffs but it was too cold and too windy to stay. We got about two pictures before I retreated back to the car. It's kinda freaky to stand on the edge of a two hundred foot cliff and feel like the wind might carry you away any moment! We will have to go back. Speaking of going back...turns out that although we thought we were going somewhere new we had actually been to Mdina before. According to the gps, on friday night when we were driving rather aimlessly trying to find our hotel, we found Mdina by mistake. We don't remember too much, but the roads all suddenly looked VERY familiar!

On our way home we decided to take a different route home and see some of the western edge of the island. Once again, these were all roads we had travelled on before, by accident. We got to one point though which had a sign saying "road closed, no access". We weren't sure how serious they were about no access, so we kept driving. Every couple hundred feet another sign, "road closed, no access". Ryan, my fearless leader, kept going. In fact, he was such a good leader that we even had another tourist in a rental car following us. We went up some seriously windy roads and into places that were clearly off limits. The road was under construction (like, one side of the road was GONE) but Ryan kept on. We ended up at the end and both hoped that we wouldn't run into some concrete block forcing us to go back!! Apparently, when the sign says "road closed" it's really only more of a suggestion. The poor little Chevrolet Matos was not a happy camper! Next time we will have to rent something with 4x4!!

Tomorrow's plan is Gozo. Should be great, if the ferry makes it across for all the wind we've been having!!