Day 1 – The long road to Athens
When Damon’s youngest daughter, Lauren, graduated from
college in June, our gift to her was a trip anywhere in the world she wanted to
go. Originally, she picked Hawaii but
after trying to schedule the trip, during Covid, when everyone else in the US
seemed to have the same idea, we bailed on that idea and surprised her with
Greece. Considering “Sisterhood of the
Travelling Pants” and “Mama Mia” were part of her formative years, we knew that
she would love it.
As always, I planned every detail of the trip including flights,
hotels, activities, inter island transfers, etc. not to mention researching every
possible activity on any island we were considering visiting. Fun fact, there are roughly 200 inhabited
islands – kind of hard to narrow it down to two, but 600 hours of research
later, I chose Santorini & Milos.
After being burned by never ending flight changes with Covid, I saved a
few final bookings for the last minute.
Thankfully. About 4 weeks before
our scheduled trip, my new company decided to hold an all company meeting
during our vacation week, so with only 3 weeks’ notice, we canceled our entire
trip and rebooked it for a week earlier.
Maybe it is time to start being more spontaneous for vacations…
Setting the stage is relevant because bumping our vacation
back a week meant that for “reasons” dealing with maintaining 1K status for
another year, I ended up on a different flight than Damon & Lauren. The scheduling was perfect as our respective
flights were only 4 hours apart with me arriving at 10:30am local, and Damon
& Lauren arriving at 2:30pm. Damon
dropped me off at ORD and I went to my gate with plenty of time to spare. I was flying to Athens via Newark. As soon as I arrived at the gate, a 30-minute
delay due to thunderstorms in New York was announced. Okay, no problem, I have a 2-hour layover, so
I’m good. We boarded the plane and taxied
out to the runway. The pilot announced another
delay. And another delay. And another delay. After 2 hours on the tarmac and a 100% chance
I was going to miss my connecting flight to Athens, the pilot, seeing no immediate
end to the delays, taxied back to the gate. I started calling United to see what my options
were – I had two - but I couldn’t book anything over the phone since I had
checked luggage. When they let us off
the plane, I ran to customer service and was able to get on a flight through
Frankfurt to Athens arriving 4 hours after Damon & Lauren landed. I just had to hang at O’Hare for a few (more)
hours. So, of course I decided to post
my predicament to Facebook.
Within a few minutes, I received a text from my good friend and college roommate (Liz Kelly), that she happened to be in O’Hare on a layover between Montana and Syracuse, so my delay turned into a wonderful impromptu reunion.
Finally boarded my
flight to Frankfurt, delayed another hour, and eventually took off at 7pm. I had a 4-hour layover in Frankfurt, so I
wasn’t worried. We landed close to on
time at 9:30am local time. Having only
slept about 3 hours, I headed to the lounge to relax and after a few hours of sitting,
I managed to secure a vacant reclining lounge chair. I was paranoid about falling asleep, so with
my alarm set, I half relaxed, until a crazy lady took the lounger next to
me. She would not stop talking to
herself, and since my flight was boarding in 15-minutes, I decided to head to
the gate.
I had spent my layover in the lounge where my flight landed,
not where my second flight departed. Rookie
mistake. Big mistake. Huge. Panic
set in when I realized I was in terminal Z and had to get to terminal B. I walked/ran until I was close to the B gate
and then total panic. With only 5
minutes to boarding, I hit a passport control area that had at least 150 people
in line ahead of me. I asked a security
officer if he could help and he said no, the area is run by the German
police. Great. He said I could try to ask people if I could
cut, so I went to the front of the line and suddenly, no one can speak
English. I went back to the end of the line
where a nice American couple said I could cut in front of them. Only 148 people to go.
I slowly made my way forward one person at a time in line begging
people to let me cut until one cranky old man said “NO”. I was like – are you serious? My plane is boarding, please! He said “NO”.
I saw a woman a few people ahead of him waiving me over until I joined
her. Now I’m thinking the man is going
to get the police and I’m going to get arrested for cutting in line. I continued to make my way one person at a
time to the front until I was about 10-15 people away and the woman ahead of me
had an equally tight turnaround. I
finally got through security and RAN through 12 more miles of airport until I
got to my gate about 15-20 minutes after boarding started. I get to my gate and it is behind a locked
security door and no one is there. In continued
panic, I ran to a monitor to find that, of course, my gate had changed. I ran to the new gate and…. Everyone was just
sitting there, they hadn’t even started boarding yet. Not surprisingly, the flight was delayed by an
hour giving me time to catch my breath.
They eventually bussed us out to the plane and since I was the last one
on the bus, I was the first one off the bus, and literally, the first one to
board the plane. Three hours later, I
made it to Athens. 24 hours after
leaving home.
Damon and Lauren had a perfectly smooth flight experience
and landed on time.
Damon and Lauren, having spent a nice relaxing afternoon
napping, were ready for dinner. I was so
tired that I couldn’t see straight so we just went to the restaurant in our
hotel, had dinner, and crashed hard.
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| View of Parthenon from our hotel balcony |
Day 3 (Day 2 was somehow consumed with travel) – Athens
After a good night sleep and a hearty breakfast, we made our way to the most obvious tourist attraction of Athens – the Acropolis. Let me start by describing Athens – I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect – it is a rather large city of about 5 million people. There are no tall buildings – the entire valley is covered in small white-ish buildings. There are a handful of hills (mountains?) that have historic or otherwise interesting monuments on top – the Acropolis is one of them. For those not in the know, the Acropolis is a pretty big area with historic ruins – multiple “buildings” plus the Parthenon, the largest of them.
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| Ampitheater |
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| Back of a historic building |
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| The money shot! |
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| Greek throne |
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| Instagram ready! |
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| Front of cool building |
It is incredible how for decades, archeologists and scientists collected thousands of pieces of these ruins scattered all over the area and figured out how to put them together &/or filled in with cement where the actual building materials should have been. All around the area are piles of numbered “parts”. I joked that it was like a giant Ikea project where you finish with three leftover screws and no idea where they are supposed to go. Only here there are about a million little leftover pieces.
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| Pile of parts |
The day was slightly less about history and slightly more about making sure Lauren had Instagram ready photos. I told her I would only make fun of her a little bit, but we had to take 16,000 pictures of her posing nonchalantly to capture the essence of a candid photo. I’m like, do you know what a candid photo is? And she said yes, that’s why I must keep moving while you take all the pictures – so they look candid. But we did get some amazing “candid” photos!
After the Acropolis, we went through the Acropolis Museum which had a lot of statues and other everyday items. I find it amazing that someone can look at a statue that is missing a leg, both arms a nose and part of a torso, and they can determine who the statue is of, how tall the statue was and recreate a lot of the missing pieces. We were not allowed to take pictures in the museum, but it was amazing. They can also figure out what colors of paint were used on the statues based on residue and mockup how it looked thousands of years ago. I also love how there might be a piece of decorative frieze that had almost nothing discernible on it and the caption would read something like “Centaur abducting a female Lapith” or there would be a recreation of Athena in a battle and the warrior she was fighting was just a foot. Totally worth a visit.
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| Parthenon Panoramic |
After the museum, we headed to the Plaka neighborhood, the center, or old town, of Athens. Small, narrow streets with lots of restaurants and shops and lots of people – it was nice to see crowds again to bring back a sense of normalcy. Masks are still required indoors, but since most everything is outdoors, it seemed relatively normal. We found a busy corner and had lunch at an outdoor café, wandered around more ruins, walked to the Parliament to watch the changing of the guards, and then went back to the hotel to siesta for a few hours.
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| "Candid" in Plaka |
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| Lunch corner |
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| Changing of the guards |
We headed back out around 5:30 to catch our first notoriously beautiful Greek sunset. Our viewing choice – the top of Mount Lycabettus – the tallest “mountain” in Athens and twice the height of the Parthenon, and a whopping 900 feet above sea level. The walk up was expected to take 30-90 minutes. It was almost all steps and took us 12 minutes. Either we are super fit or the people they follow for estimates are all hobbled. Regardless, we made it to the top where the views were stunning – 360 degrees of Athens landscape, a bar & restaurant where we drank wine and Ouzo waiting for the sun to go down.
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| Ouzo/Wine |
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| More wine |
Our first sunset did not disappoint, and people clapped when the sun dipped below the horizon. The way down was faster, and we were on the hunt for a restaurant for dinner. We happened upon a narrow street that was fully blocked off with music and restaurants lining the street on both sides and had a nice dinner before catching a taxi back to the hotel to finally crash for the night
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| Sunset |
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| Parthenon in background |
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