THE plane to Greece was full of hope. Middle aged couples wearing strong shoes and heaving rucksacks from the conveyer belt ready for a week of walking. Youngsters who had rented a house that would hold eight; there were 11 of them actually, but there would be plenty of room.
A girl reading her Greek phrase book; a boy reading Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi; a couple reassuring their ten year old boy that there would be chips and ice cream and loads of other kids when he got there; a woman reassuring her mother that there would be plenty of other mature people and she would not stick out like a sore thumb in a world of juveniles.
And then the plane landed in the glorious late afternoon light of Athens and everyone, scattered to different islands by plane or boat.
Most of the people waiting for the flight to Heraklion were Greek boys and girls, very young and very happy. They were supporters of a football club which had won and they sang and embraced each other and took hundreds of pictures of each other and strangers to remember the occasion.
You never saw such good humour - the plane could have flown off south to Crete without starting the engines.
When the pilot said that we were passing over the island of Milos they all cheered and cheered again and kept giving thumbs up signs or thumbs down signs. It was obviously a place like Cork, that provokes passion.
Heraklion airport has changed a bit since 1980. The system of luggage handling hasn't. Warm reassurances that it would all come tomorrow, no problem, no worries and no sense of surprise. It was, oddly enough, very consoling, the charming indifference and hand patting. The implication that delivering mislaid suitcases to hotels was practically the mainstay of the Cretan taximen.
Everyone cheered up instantly and headed east across the island, where everyone was getting geared up for the season, places were having a final coat of paint, the souvenirs were being gathered in the shops, the restaurants having their signs re done. Hersonnissos looked like Torremolinos, and Malia almost as big.
Back in the 1960s one didn't exist at all and the other was a tiny place with three tavernas.
But then, don't you get sick of people who come here and say wistfully they remember when there were three families with buckets and spades on the beaches in Kilkee and Tramore, and isn't it terrible the way things have gone these days?
Continuing through the dark night to Aghios Nicholas, the roads get bigger and better, and anyone who is against that kind of progress is mad. Back in the 1960s you took your life in your hands going round any corner. Nowadays it's like a highway.
It was hard to see and recognise places in the night. Was the Dolphin still there, and Olga's Pension? And it was impossible to see the hotel we were staying in because it was all so late and dark. But what the hell, we'll look at it tomorrow.
BRIGHT, bright sunshine, and the hotel - the Minos Palace - turned out to be enormous and luxurious, and would obviously accommodate hordes of people during high season. Some hardy Scandinavians and Germans were there, but very few English speakers who are known to be more feeble and want to wait until there's guaranteed sunshine later on in the year. It was full of gardens and terraces and a huge swimming pool, and leafy paths to the beach.
Then the suitcases arrived as everyone - had said they would, and it was time to go into town for an Ouzo. It's under a mile from, the hotel to the harbour and the town centre. The others walked it lots of times; I was more into the slow progress of the hired car or the hiring of the taxi. But even from the car you could check: Olga's is still there - it's called the Knossos now; the Dolphin is there but hadn't opened for Easter, the Hotel Alto, isn't, but there's another, much more elegant, Lato out the road.
"The place called Sheppard's Bar has gone. It was a flashy sort of place which I had mentioned a long time ago in The Irish Times: in less than rapturous terms. Brian Sheppard wrote a terrible letter to the editor of The Irish Times saying that he felt it should be known that my research was seriously faulty as it involved a lot of low life local places and cheap wine. What he couldn't know was that his letter was read aloud approvingly to my colleagues at the time, who all clapped.
I noted that Sheppard's Bar had gone, not, with pleasure - that would be too vengeful altogether - but let's say with some interest.
And the harbour is crowded as it always was, with working boats and visiting boats as well as tourist boats which will take you out to Spinalonga and Moklos. There are dozens of restaurants, and places that do one hour processing, and sell postcards and yesterday's English newspapers, and patterned plates and real sponges.
And in the restaurants you would be mad to eat anything but a meze: a mixture of what they think is best - little kebabs, omelettes, cheese and those huge juicy tomatoes, aubergines, red mullet, kalamari, olives and bread, all served on little plates until they think you are beginning to falter.
If you have been fairly heavy hitters at the food and wine, they always come out with a little tray of raki, on the house. It's like petrol really, but given with such generosity and warmth I never saw anyone refuse it.
And because we had hired a car we headed off on great journeys, across the mountains covered with bright yellow mimosa to Sitia, for example. There were little herds of goats with bells around their necks trotting along, unconcerned that progress had built them a great tarmac road now instead of wild, narrow mountain paths.
Away from the towns there were the old tavernas that we all remembered from times past, simple places with a vine trailing up and down posts supporting a corrugated iron roof, and where "lamb" was always spelled "lamp" on the menu.
We stopped to have lunch in a place that was just opening up for the season, where they had giant barrels of local wine and retsina, vastly reassuring in size and served at the table in metal jugs. They brought us cakes and honey with the complimentary raki, thinking that the advent of five such hungry people on day one of their trading must he a very good omen for the summer.
And another day we drove to Ierapetra on the south coast of the island, just waking up after its winter sleep and putting out the sponges and the tapes of Theodorakis to attract the visitors.
Between us, we all knew a lot of people who lived there and the general word was that the last few summers had not been great for the locals. Probably too many people had gone into the accommodation business now, they had seen too many neighbours setting up tavernas and making fortunes and had tried to do it themselves. The little streets are not nearly wide enough for the huge buses that go through in summer and you just could never develop nerves steely enough to cope with all the tourists who hire scooters and seem to fall off them in front of you all the time.
And yes, there is a tiresome element of noisy young people who come in the summer, the older people say, boys with lots of earrings and girls with wild hair and strange make up, and because of them, most of the tavernas stock a wide range of lagers.
So maybe it's best to go off season if you, are of the age group that likes things a bit less: lager filled. And of course, if you haven't been there for a while you will see much more Crete than there was before, and perhaps mourn the days when you knew every single Yanni, and Manolis and Georgiou.
But you'll still know a fair number and they will remember you. And the light over the Gulf of Mirabello hasn't changed, and the smell of grilled fish, the sound of Kaymos playing from a speaker in someone's kitchen, the chat of old men in black with their tiny coffees and their orange worry beads - none of that has changed.
There was only one swim because, though sunny, it was still a little fresh, or some might say downright freezing, in the water.
But what we did have was a wonderful, week of remembering and laughing and eating and drinking and admiring the wonderful two dimensional Cretan mountains which always look as if they have been cut from cardboard and sent down to be photographed.
And we patted ourselves on the back for having what we like to think of as the maturity to realise that things were neither better then nor better now. They were just different.