Although I think the videos mostly speak for themselves, I promised the full story so here it is (sorry for the length, brevity is not a gift that I have):
Tara and I left Texas on Monday, May 17th. As we got closer and closer to our departure date, it started looking less and less likely that we would actually make it to Greece when we were supposed to. Our original plan was to arrive in Athens about 3 hours apart on Tuesday afternoon (Tara first, then me), stay for 2 days in Athens, and then take a train to Katerini on Thursday. About a week before, my parents heard about a 24-hour public and private sector strike coming up. On Thursday. Awesome.
So, with all of Greece more or less shutting down on Thursday, my parents went to the train station and bought tickets for us for the last train out on Wednesday night. That way we still get a day and a half in Athens and make it home before the strike. Crisis averted.
If you remember back to April, the volcano with the ridiculous name that erupted in Iceland caused all kinds of trouble for air travel in Europe, particularly in London. I knew that I had a layover at Heathrow, but that was a full month before, so I assumed it wouldn't be a problem. But then it erupted again. The reports coming in that weekend said that many airports in the UK were already closed and the London airports would likely be closing....oh, on Monday or Tuesday. My flight arrived Tuesday morning. Awesome.
Then I went to church on Sunday. I was telling some of my friends after the service about the strikes in Greece and the volcano and how I was concerned I may not make it. Then it came up that I was flying on British Airways. One of my friends tells me "Oh, I know someone else that is flying British Airways through London, but their flight is canceled because of the strike on Tuesday." Another strike. Fantastic.
So I get online and find out that there is, in fact, a British Airways strike beginning the day of my flight, but they only canceled half of the flights and my flight was not one of them. Ok, crisis #2 averted. As long as the ash cloud holds off and Greece doesn't randomly strike on Tuesday I'll be good to go.
So I get on my flight and turns out that the London airport was closed for a few hours but it wasn't too major and everything was up and running again by the time I got there. I made it to Athens right on time (actually about 10 minutes ahead of schedule, surprisingly enough). So I walk out of the baggage claims/customs area and see my mom, but Tara wasn't with her like we planned. Turns out there was some mechanical problem with Tara's flight out of Newark and she was delayed. For 12 hours.
Here we were all worried that I wouldn't make it for the multitude of reasons mentioned above and it was actually Tara that didn't make it. Irony. Love it.
So Tara's delay actually put her at the airport around 2:30am, but the Metro that we needed to take to get to the airport closes at midnight. After figuring out all our options, we decide to take the Metro from our hotel to Syntagma (the parliament building area) before midnight, and then there was a bus to the airport that takes about 70 min. and runs late at night. So we do that, pick up Tara, take the bus back to Syntagma, and then we had to take a taxi back to the hotel (and my mom got to use her new-found hardcore negotiating skills to force the driver to knock 5 euros off his price. it was awesome).
Ok, so we made it back to our hotel at like 4am, and woke up a few hours later so we could spend the day in Athens before our train leaves at 8:30pm. We went to the Acropolis, the Plaka, Monastiraki, all the normal Athens places, and it was great, but we were super tired and very ready for our train ride home. So we get to the train station with all our bags about a half-hour before our train and my mom went inside to find out which platform to wait on since the signs didn't say anything.
Surprise! They decided to move up the strike. Wow. No trains out the rest of the night. For some unknown reason, even though the strike was still happening on Thursday, they decided to have one train to Thessaloniki. Thankfully, we got on it. We had to find a hotel for the night, which was more craziness, but we ended up back at the same hotel we had been at the night before, right across from the train station.
So after lots of ridiculousness, we finally made it back to Katerini on Thursday afternoon. And just to add a little more random into the mix, my dad (who can strike up a conversation with a brick wall) had made friends with some Greek tobacco farmers earlier in the week and wanted to take us out to meet them. We drove out near their village and found then working in the field so we stopped and "helped" them for awhile and then they invited us back to their house for coffee.
It was a great little re-introduction to Greek life and actually helped me remember the few Greek words that I had picked up from my previous trips.
Tara and I are leaving tomorrow evening and taking a bus to Istanbul (we wanted to take the train, but that's a whole other story that involves flooding and a frog plague. Don't worry about it). I will try to blog about that as soon as we get back. But I'm hoping that this trip won't be quite as "eventful".
Until then, you should check out my dad's blog at tracyandmary.wordpress.com. I promise his posts are much shorter than mine. And he has pictures. And some of them are of me ;-)
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