Sheep Guarding Llama

Wednesday. GT2 Day Four. Athens, Greece.

It is another super hot day here in the city. Way too warm for me. Dominica woke me up around eight thirty with the plan being that we should get the girls up and get moving to go do things. We were not sure which things, but things. But the girls did not get up and we let them sleep for a while (for a long while.)

Dominica wanted baked goods so sent me out to Oliver’s Boulangerie to get croissants for everyone. I got myself a lemon and vanilla filled little one, two regular chocolate filled for Madeline & Emily, and a large plain one for Dominica because she had wanted an almond one and they did not have one. But Dominica wanted the lemon one so I gave her that. Then she wanted the plain one, so she had two. No big deal, as I don’t like to eat in the morning. But the bakery goods are so good.

Dominica made the coffee and did laundry this morning. I did some more media uploading and shot a couple of videos outside.

The day heated up quickly and we decided that allowing the girls to sleep was probably the best thing as we can’t let them run out of sleep. And tomorrow we fly to Santorini, which means that we have to be up and moving before three in the morning! Our flight is an hour away, and flies out at six. Tomorrow is going to be rough, but it is our main day to see Santorini so we have to be on our game for it.

The first of the girls woke up at ten minutes to noon! That was Emily. Who was dressed and ready for action around noon. Madeline finally emerged at twelve thirty, also dressed, but upset that she had to get up and immediately went back to bed. Dominica decided to go hide in her room to get away from grumpy teenagers.

It took nearly another hour, but we finally got everyone out of the door. Dominica made the decision that we were renting a cab to take us to Syntagma square to speed things up and so that we would not be so exhausted when we arrived.

First up, she had the girls watch the changing of the guards at the palace. That took about twenty minutes. I found some shade off to the side and hung out there as I was going to expire if I just stood in the sun all day.

From there we walked along the National Gardens and Emily and I went hat shopping and each bought a new hat. She went very Audrey Hepburn, which was funny since she was also wearing a very apropos black dress today. And Emily picked out a woven paper fedora for me.

Then we walked the National Gardens and did some pictures there. And then it was into The Plaka that we went to see old Athens. It’s a neat area, but so ridiculously touristy as to be completed wasted. Worth seeing for five minutes, tops. If it were up to me, I would totally avoid it.

We did some shopping for souvenirs, jewelry, and then lunch. The barkers are ridiculous there and make it completely uncomfortable to try to do anything. And it never feels safe. There are visibly gypsies about, but the barkers are just as bad.

It took us a good hour to find a place to eat. Long enough that half of the places were closing by the time that we tried to eat there. It is tough to find anything but traditional Greek food in The Plaka as everyone is trying to do the touristy thing so they want to do what people picture as Greek food.

We found a cafe that was open and that offered sandwiches and things that the girls would eat. I was crazy hot from the humidity, sun, and lack of air movement in the tight streets of The Plaka. So we sat outside with the fans and it felt good. Dominica and I got salmon sandwiches, the girls both got turkey sandwiches.

After we ate, we got coffee and sat for a bit. It was so nice to just sit and relax. Dominica and Madeline got some iced coffee that they loved. I got a double cappuccino.

Next up was a little shopping. Then the gelato place for an iced strawberry drink for Emily. I managed to resist getting gelato even though it looked wonderful.

We stopped at a jewelry store that we had seen earlier in the afternoon and the girls bought some Pandora stuff that they had been thinking about.

We walked out of The Plaka and along the Roman Forum. Then to the old Agora. And all of the way back to our apartment. It was a good day of walking, about seven thousand steps during our sight seeing.

Today has to be a short day. We were back to the apartment by a quarter to six. I have an eight o’clock meeting that I need to attend. Then we have to pack and get the apartment ready to turn over and schedule our early morning ride to the airport. Then get to sleep as early as we can muster. We need to be in the taxi around three in the morning to get to the airport in time to make our flight to Santorini. We should arrive in Santorini before seven. We are able to drop our bags at our AirBnB there, but can’t check in until the afternoon. So it is looking like a morning at the beach is the plan, the probably going into Thera once we get settled in to the apartment.

Dominica and Madeline napped as soon as we were back. Emily took a shower. I worked on uploading what I could from the day, and clearing the camera of whatever I could to our hard drive. Fingers crossed that we will have more Internet speeds on Santorini, but that is just about impossible. Crete is our best hope, and that isn’t very good. The speeds here have been terrible, but that’s expected so we aren’t complaining.

I got a shower in around seven. I felt much better after that. Then I had about half an hour to prepare for a meeting that I had scheduled at eight.

My eight o’clock meeting went well. And while I was on it I got summoned to a work emergency where I spent another two hours! A very busy night.

While I was working, Dominica and Emily went back to the pizza place for dinner. They brought home a huge burger (for Emily, of course), and an egg salad club for Dominica, and a chocolate banana crepe. The meals were huge and amazingly good. I didn’t want anything and just eating the left over club and fries filled me up completely.

I worked for a bit longer while Dominica was packing. Then at eleven fifteen our Los Angeles data center. When it rains it pours. Of course this would happen this evening. That was fixed a little before midnight. I was racing to finish things up so that I could head to bed. I’ll be lucky to get two hours of sleep.

Tuesday. GT2 Day 3. Athens, Greece.

Dominica made us all get up at eight this morning. Way too early. But my watch says that I managed to get some real sleep last night. So that is not too bad. Dominica was the first one up and showered before she woke me up. Then she woke up the girls who were definitely not ready to get out of bed.

As expected, it is really hot today. The weather was calling for it to be 82F but the sun is bright and the humidity is high. And we have a lot of walking to do.

Madeline ate a croissant and we were off. We had to walk back up the hill that we walked up yesterday, and a long way beyond it. It was blazing hot and we were feeling pretty awful long before we even got to the entrance to the Acropolis. But it really was a short walk from the apartment, this is an amazing location.

We got to the Acropolis and got our tickets. Madeline was half price, Emily was free. We had to leave the camera’s microphone behind for whatever reason. That seemed a bit odd to me. I guess that they want to discourage people making noise or spending extra time up on the hill since there are just so many people up there already?

The hike up to the top was incredibly hot. There was almost no breeze and there is never any shade there. There was no way not to be covered in sweat.

We did the sites as quickly as we could. The girls did the Rick Steve’s Self Walking Tour that you can download. We didn’t stay long, they were going to expire in the sun.

We walked down, then went and found a cafe for lunch. We found a place near the Acropolis Museum. The girls both got Caesar salads, Dominica got a local brunch thing of bread with eggs and tomatoes on it, and I got a salmon sandwich. It was all very good. I got a beer.

The couple at the table next to us were from Baton Rouge and on their honeymoon. They are doing very much the same trip as us. They are just one or two days ahead of us. They flew from New Orleans to Athens. Doing the same three or four days in Athens as us, did the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum. They are leaving today to fly to Santorini where they are doing one night, just like us. Then they are taking the ferry to Crete, just like us. They are staying around Chania, just like us. But they are only there for a few days. But like us, renting a car while they are there. Then they are off to Italy, just like us! But they are going north and down, rather than south to north like we are. They are using Rick Steve’s guides, too. They will be in the Cinque Terre, which we wanted to do but could not fit into our trip, again.

After lunch it was time for the museum, which was very near by. We walked there and did it relatively quickly, too. Definitely faster than we did in 2016 when we did it with Liesl and Luciana. It wasn’t cool enough inside to recover from how hot we had been. That did not help. But it is such a great museum, it was still good to see it all again.

From there, we walked back to the apartment. We were burnt out and needed a rest. Everyone but me napped for a while in the heavily air conditioned bedrooms. I backed up the camera from the morning’s picture and video taking and starting uploading what I could to Flickr. The Internet is not very good anywhere around here, which is likely to be the case all across Greece, so uploading videos is just impossible. Even just uploading photos to Flickr is proving to be decently challenging. It took hours just to upload the ones from today! I did some writing on SGL, I posted on MangoLassi. I got the devices ready for this evening.

This morning’s activities surprisingly only came out to 10,300 steps, according to my watch. But that was almost all hill climbing. Very rough going with rapid altitude changes. So that seems about right.

But five, I was sitting around wondering what we were going to be doing this evening. Everyone was so pooped, but I was ready to head out for more sight seeing.

We ended up getting a thunderstorm this early evening. But only a few drops of rain, nothing of which to speak. But it was nice and overcast for a while.

It ended up being many more hours before we were ready to do anything. The girls were just exhausted. By eight we finally had them up and deciding what to do. Dominica talked them into a tapas style place, it is called mezes here. Small plates so that they can choose a variety of things. But no menu online. Not a far walk, though, and in a direction that we have not gone before so it will be good to see a little more of the city.

We walked down and had dinner at Karderina. The food was excellent and the ambience was absolutely amazing. Gravel floor, wide open walls, cool decor. We loved the place. Sadly, there was almost nothing for the girls to eat. Emily can’t have dairy without medicine so generally avoids it. Madeline is super picky and while willing to try some new foods, almost never likes them. The menu was very large and just loaded with things that we wanted to try, but the girls decided that all that they wanted were French fries. So after three days in Greece, a land of truly amazing local cuisine, they have experiences only pizza, croissants, Caesar salds, and French fries. Dominica and I did not hold back; we got zucchini balls, fried haddock with garlic sauce, some flaky pie pastry filled with savory cheese and covered in honey, and french fries with cheese and eggs. It was all really excellent, a great restaurant choice. I had the house ouzo with my dinner. The girls avoided trying it because neither likes licorice or anise or anything in that flavour family. They miss out on all the good stuff.

After our meal, the restaurant surprised us with chocolate cake and ice cream.

We walked back home. We were pretty warm, so we got the air conditioning running. The girls were pretty tired, so the plan was to grab a bottle of wine and chill out at the house. But the “OK Anytime” across the street was not as “anytime” as claimed and was closed. Madeline found a corner store not too far away that was open for another twenty minutes (it was after eleven thirty at this point) so Dominica and Madeline went to bed, and Emily and I walked to the other side of the subway tracks and found a little corner store and bought a bottle of moscato, the only sweet white wine that they had there. It was still hot and humid, though.

We got back to the apartment and sat on the balcony for about an hour or two having a glass of white wine and just enjoying the people watching in Athens and the cooler air and doing some posting and texting with people back home. It was after midnight when we went out and after one when we came in. I got to sleep somewhere around two in the morning.

End of day exercise: 15K steps and 7 miles of walking in the heat, much of that climbing hills. (Emily’s watch recorded 17K steps over a shorter distance, showing how much taller I am.)

Monday. GT2 Day 2.

No sleep for us. Our day began in the air, but started with us landing in London at Gatwich where we are spending the night. In the morning we will fly on to Athens. We arrived on time, just after midnight local time which wasn’t too bad for us, although at this point we were all starting to get just a little bit tired.

We had to pick up the luggage here as our morning flight was not connected to our overnight one from New York. So we had to go through customs and all of that stuff. So technically Emily got to be in England for several hours.

We used our time at Gatwick to move from the South Terminal where we had arrived with Norwegian, to the North Terminal where we are flying out with EasyJet. And there we located the pub that I had looked up ahead of time and thought that we should use, the Nicholas Culpepper. We found a table in the corner and ordered sandwiches and drinks. They are a twenty four hour spot, thank goodness.

The girls both got chicken pesto toasties. Dominica got a fried egg sandwich. I got a tuna melt, which was excellent. I grabbed the only cask ale that they had on pull, which was the Greene King IPA. Not bad. Emily ordered a glass of wine, her first time ever ordering wine (or anything) in public. And they thought nothing of it. She didn’t even get carded. Although the drinking age in London is sixteen, so being nearly eighteen she looks plenty old to be getting a wine with dinner. Carding people isn’t nearly as common in Europe as in the US where you expect it at every turn.

We stayed at the pub for a couple of hours. We could not go through security again until EasyJet opened up their bag drops, and that was closed due to how late at night we were there. So we were trapped in the pre-security area. By the end of that time, we were extremely tired. And Emily was pretty tipsy from her wine, which was not helping her with the exhaustion.

After a few hours wait, we were able to check Dominica’s bag and go through security. Then we had a couple of hours to wait inside of security. Here there was loads of shopping options including the Harry Potter Store.

Everyone was too tired to shop.. Madeline and I hunted down some coffee at Pret a Manger. That was about it. Flat whites, real European coffee.

We got on our plane and were off. We had to board from the tarmac, a first for Emily. We were in the next to last row. The girls and I sat together. Dominica sat across the aisle. There was no entertainment on this flight, I attempted to rest, but that was hard. The three of them managed to get some sleep. I got nothing. This is going to be a very long day.

It was around eleven in the morning when we landed in Athens. Ah, back in Greece!

It took a long time to get out of the airport and we had been planning on taking the subway to our apartment. But we were all so tired and the ride was so long and we were not totally sure of the location so we opted for a taxi. The price controlled taxis from the airport are thirty eight Euros. So expensive but not terrible.

The taxi ride was long and hot and Madeline was pretty sure that Dominica and Emily were going to get sick while we did it. Our driver found our AirBnB, though, without a problem and our host was waiting for us on the street. It was all nice and easy.

We got in and shown around the apartment. It is really nice. Two decent bedrooms, a really nice living room area, a giant wrap around balcony, even a roof top terrace. Dominica and I went downstairs for some coffee. Madeline and Emily went right to bed to get in some sleep.

Dominica and I went to bed after we finished our coffee and explored the awesome bakery that is right across the street. We picked up some croissants for later.

We all slept until the early evening. Then we dressed and set out. I did a few thousand steps, according to my watch, trying to find what was around us. There is a grocery store across the street, a barber shop next door, and a pizza place beside that. Plus the bakery across the intersection.

So since there really wasn’t any food except for the pizza plus, which our hostess had told us was the place to go, we just went there. We got two pizzas. Dominica and I got a standard margharita. Emily and Madeline got a four cheese. Then we hit the grocery store for snacks and supplies, and Emily’s first chance to see a grocery store in Europe. Kind of Madeline’s first, too, but she has been to the UK and Ireland and that is pretty similar. Then the girls all returned to the apartment, and I went and got our pizza.

We ate on the balcony. Emily discovered that four cheese often includes at least one blue cheese and that she does not like blue cheese. So that was not a big win for her. But the pizza was generally pretty good.

After dinner we decided to just go walking and see the Acropolis tonight, it is pretty cool lit up at night.

It turned into a pretty hefty walk. Very steep climb up the hill. Once we got high up, though, we found that we were close to the bar district and that there was a ton of stuff to do. We walked it a bit and found a hotel with a roof top terrace that looked interesting and so that’s what we did.

It was a great decision, we had a really nice time. Madeline and Emily both had their first ever cocktails. Madeline got a mud slide. Emily got a passion fruit martini. I got a fig sour which was awesome. Dominica and the girls got banana chocolate crepes, too. This was Emily’s first crepe, too. She is having a lot of “firsts” on this trip. I have started keeping a list, in fact.

The view from the terrace was amazing. A clear view of the Acropolis and many other sites. Unfortunately it was so dark that it was nearly impossible to film anything. But it was super cool.

We hung out there until we were tired and ready for bed. We came back and everyone went right to bed except for me. I stayed up working on uploading media and other tasks until about one thirty in the morning.

End of day exercise, about 11K steps.

Sunday. GT2 Day 1. London.

My alarm went off at three thirty this morning. Ugh. This is going to be such a long day. We did pretty well getting ready and out the door. It was just minutes after four when we got the rental Nissan Versa on the road and underway.

The drive down to New York City went super smoothly. No traffic, no issues, good weather. We did so well that we were well ahead of schedule when we arrived, getting all of the way down to JFK before eight in the morning! Because we were driving so far, we had allowed ourselves more like five hours to get to the airport, just in case anything went wrong like leaving late or hitting traffic. But it all went perfectly smoothly leaving us at the airport nearly five hours before our flight!

We dropped off the car at Enterprise, which we know really well at this point, and took their shuttle bus to Federal Circle, and the bus (because as always, the train is down for maintenance) to the airport.

Our first issue of travel came up when we went to check in for our Norwegian flight to London. We had misunderstood the wording of the weight allowances and we had to shed about a dozen kilos of total weight and check that. So we had to rebalance our bags and check one for an additional hundred dollars. Hardly tragic, but a rough start and Dominica was pretty grumpy. But it means that she didn’t have to carry a backpack all day like the other three of us did. So not all bad.

We got right through security and were at the terminal awaiting our flight. We had hours and hours to kill. Emily and I did some filming while we were there because there was nothing else to do. Filming in airports is awful, but it is also a good use of the time. We got some food there. I had avoided eating all morning because of all of the traveling that we were going to be doing, but the falafel wrap from Eat & Go just looked too good (and it was delicious.) This Eat & Go is new at JFK since the last time that we were there, but it has a sister location in Istanbul that I have eaten at in the past.

It was a long wait, but everyone had energy as we are off on our adventure. Thankfully our flight was on time and we were off to London!

On the flight we were two and two. Dominica and I sat together, Madeline and Emily sat across the aisle from us. We had an Airbus A320-300 which was basically an antique, but it was clean and very high end and loaded with amenities, which was nice. We had in flight entertainment. I managed to watch the new Tomb Raider movie which I liked, and I watched the new Blade Runner 2049 film which was very good. I knew that there wasn’t enough time to finish a third movie so I watched most of We’re the Millers which I have seen previously and enjoyed. With the movies, the flight seemed to take no time at all. It was only a seven hour flight, after all, and it felt like we were almost immediately in London.

We landed at London Gatwick just after midnight. We will be here for the next several hours. Time to find a pub and get a little London experience before heading on to Greece.

Saturday. This is it, our last day before heading out to Europe for a month for Emily’s Grand Tour of Europe (aka GT2.) We are in Frankfort, New York today at Dominica’s parents’ house.

We had to be up a little early today because we are starting the day at Dave’s Diner for breakfast. I had an egg and cheese on a bagel.

From breakfast, Dominica and I went to Syracuse airport to pick up our Nissan Versa rental car from Enterprise. We are using that in the morning to get to JFK in New York City.

Then back to the house where we had some time to relax. We spent a bit of time hanging out in the yard. The dogs enjoyed being outside for much of the day.

Lunch was Big Willie’s pizza. I had planned on skipping lunch today, but I can’t resist good New York pizza.

The rest of the day was all logistics. Packing and getting the car loaded up. We tried to get to bed as early as possible, we have to be up at three thirty to be on the road at four, to get to the airport by nine, to fly out a little after noon and then tomorrow night we will be in London!

Said our goodbyes to the kids tonight. It is going to be a long month without my babies.