Across the pond

Air France's excellent airfare to Athens ($650 pp all in) required us to fly from Montreal. AF sells you tickets to leave from Ottawa but doesn't actually fly you out of Ottawa - they load you onto one of their coaches and drive you to Montreal. But annoyingly, they will not sell you a ticket on their coach to Montreal. So we had to make our own way, which we did via Greyhound leaving at 1300 on Tuesday.

We flew out of Mtl around 1730 and as we flew over Nova Scotia, dinner was rolled out. As can be seen from the pic, there was quite a variety of tastes for the palate:




Beef in gravy with mashed potatoes, curried rice with veg, tomato juice, water, 2 rolls with butter, foie gras on crustini, red wine from 'le pays d'Oc', Gouda cheese, lemon meringue tart, coffee, a piece of chocolate and 5cl of port to top it all off. As we finished with St. Pierre & Miquilon below, all we could say was OUFF, ça suffit!

After dinner all the lights were dimmed to facilitate sleep; only to be turned up again some 3 hours later for breakfast! At any rate neither of us got any sleep before landing at Paris CDG at 05:25. We were whisked through customs in a flash and made our way to our connecting flight to Athens.

We were delayed for 45 minutes leaving Athens. The weather was quite good along the way and we got to see some oustanding scenery as we flew over the Alps, the Venetian lagoon and then along Croatia's Adriatic coast. We landed in Athens at noon sharp and were in our hotel by 2 p.m.



No incidents of note on this last leg except for discovering that someone opened our baggage with metal shears. In my case they simply cut the loops on the zipper fasteners instead of the TSA-approved lock itself, which means I'll never be able to lock that bag again. Grr-r-r!

Having gone without sleep for over 24 hours has left is with little energy for anything except laying low until bedtime. We walked around our Plaka neighbourhood and managed to find a place where I could buy a toothbrush, having forgotten to pack one.

Back to the hotel late afternoon as it started to sprinkle. Caught a couple of winks and woke up with lightning and a major downpour on our hands. We had to get out for supper so we headed out for the closest restaurant (Korean).

I am sure that we will never see rain like we did in Arcos de la Frontera (Spain) 2 years ago as even water already in the storm sewers gushed back up and flipped the 'personhole' covers like they were poker chips - but the rain racing down the hilly neighbourhood streets tonite came pretty close!

Things eventually quieted down by the end of supper so we made our way back and are now calling it a (33 hour) day!

-- Post From My iPhone

Location:Ναυάρχου Νικοδήμου,Athens,Greece