Day 15 - Athens, Greece

Ahh travel - you better learn to roll with whatever comes up or you’ll be miserable. Like when your hotel in Athens sends an email that there is a taxi strike on the day you arrive. A what??? Yep a taxi strike all over Athens. But, the hotel will set up private transportation from the airport for a crazy price. What are we going to do - sign us up for the ridiculously priced ride from the airport to the hotel, lol. We have to get there and I’m not quite up for public transportation in Athens. But nothing is easy in airport transportation for us this week. The first driver’s car broke down; and an hour later with two calls to the hotel, we had a second driver.

On the plus side, we had no issues getting to the airport at 6:00 this morning. That driver was prompt and courteous. We all looked at his van and totally recognized it from Sunday night. He was there with a sign that said “Island Travel,” not THOMPSON. Even when we asked if he was there for Thompson, he said no. How were we supposed to know he was the guy?

A benefit of being up so early was the sunrise.

The flight to Athens marks six flights in two weeks. Now we have a two week break before flight seven.

TSA fail counter: 3

Offense: Something in Martha’s backpack. After an extensive search and running the bag back through the scanner twice, the agent found an apple AirTag with her passport. He said “AHA!” with great glee! She didn’t mention that there are at least three other AirTags in our luggage but they didn’t cause a problem. As we all know, when it comes to airport security, some things are better left unsaid.

Martha and I are staying at a Marriott Autograph Hotel in Athens. Since our room was not ready, we visited the lobby bar for lunch. The lobby bar is very cool and there are sayings from Socrates and Plato all around the lobby. We were also given a welcome non-alcoholic tea drink.

I am a big reader and since the iPad added a Kindle app, I haven’t held a book in my hands in ten years. But at the pool over the past few days I realized my iPad cannot withstand the heat we will be enduring this summer. So I Googled Athens bookstores with books in English. Turns out our hotel is two blocks from bookstore central. The site I found even told me to go in door B for the English section. Thank you very much Google.

As you know from Budapest and other trips, we are big fans of rooftop bars. Well, our hotel has one called NYX. We go check it out and when we got there, looked to the right: OMG WOW!

Of course we stayed for wine to enjoy the view. This is a Japanese restaurant, in Athens I know, and I’m definitely wary of fish, especially raw fish in 100 degree weather, but we ordered Yaki (skewers) Gyuniku (teriyaki beef). So gooooood. 💯 meant to take a picture but scarfed it down too quickly.

And more wisdom from Plato:

“Writing is the geometry of the soul”. Does this mean I can do geometry now since I’m mostly writing this blog? I sure couldn’t do it at Montini in 1978.