Saturday 5th May
Our last dash to Malpensa Airport. We get lost a few times on the way. An infuriating aspect of Italian roads for visitors is that road signs to turn off a road to head for some other destination often come just after the turn off! At the same time you are often being harassed from behind by impatient locals – so by the time you ealise your turn off point you are past it. With a few anxious moments in (town outside of Milan??) we find our way to terminal 1at the airport. We are soon parked in the Avis car return area. We have arrived! With the car completely unscathed. After 23 days of some pretty dodgy driving. No prangs. No scratches. Any one of which could have cost us up to E1800. Instead we have saved E350 on a full insurance. Was it worth it? Also the whole business of returning our car to Italy and then flying on the Greece has worked perfectly.
As we board our Aegean Airlines flight – I see it is a modern Boeing 737-300. There is a sticker on the side of the plane saying “Airline of the Year 2005/6”. I should be reliable. 2hs 10mins to Athens. We will stay at the Acropolis Select Hotel tonight and meet our group. From reading the tour guide they may well be mainly Americans.
At Athens we simply walk through with no customs or passport check. We take a taxi to our hotel – which takes us along a completely modern motorway for 20 minutes. The country side is rocky and dry and the soil is red. It could be southern Mediterranean. We turn off into the centre of Athens and traffic slows to a crawl. We pass the stadium which was used in 1896 for the first modern Olympic Games. It was also used to start and finish the marathon in the 2004 Athens Olympics.
We arrive at our hotel. Some derelict looking reconstruction across the road but our hotel is modern. We meet with our tour group at 6pm. Amanda is our tour leader. She is from London, but has lived in Greece for 25 years. While others take the evening out option for E50 each, Zita and I walk up to the Plaka district for an evening wander. There are many many shops, a lot full of tacky tourist trinkets which soon become irritating, but more quality as well, and Tavernas, all open till late.
Later we have a vegetarian Mousaka and Greek Salad at “God’s” place – named after the manner and look of the head waiter. This is a Lonely Planet guide recommendation. As we finished our meal it seemed to me God looked pretty worn out.
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