Crete

Our ship stopped in Heraklion. We had been told by one of the tour people that this was a fairly grim city, and that if we didn't go on the excursion, then we may as well stay on the ship. I took the tour to the Palace of Knosis (underneath which the Minotaur supposedly roamed), while my wife and daughter went into the city.

The tour bus drove well out of town to an open air museum. We barely visited the museum before heading back the way we came and going to Palace of Knosis. At the time, I thought "I'd rather have spent the time going to and at the open air museum at the Palace of Knosis Alas, the Palace of Knosis was the only place on our tours that I found dissappointing. We had an hour to spend there, and after half an hour I saw all I wanted to see, got bored, and went out to look at the nearby tourist shops. The issue is that it is being excavated, and there's not a lot to see yet.

My advice would be to check a guide book for the city, and pick one thing to see. Then rather than take the tour, get off the ship and take a taxi to the place of your choice (there were several places that looked interesting to me in our guidebook) and then take a taxi back to the ship.