“Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life”
― Michael Palin
Go-Date: Day 56, Tuesday. March 19
Lesson Learned: Travel days suck. No way around that. Muscling your luggage into a cab, car or bus, then through check-in, on to security and then boarding. Tolerate the voyage, and then you reverse the outbound process. International travel complicates this even more since you have to deal with customs, passport control, visas, etc.
Our advice is prepare, simplify, and take advantages of services when you can. We thought we would carry-on for air travel. We don’t. Checking your bags makes air travel much easier. Carry-on is restricted by size and weight. Size is smaller than US carriers, and weight is 12 kilos (which is 26.5 pounds). This may sound like enough, but that includes your bag. Just try to pack for 6 months in that weight limit.
We got a credit card (Chase Sapphire) which gives us access to Passport lounges where we can get free snacks, drinks, and sit on couches instead of airport chairs in the departure lounges. They have free Wi-Fi, electric outlets, a board where you can watch your flight status, and its quiet. What a relief. We don’t like to get to the airport at the last minute, because we expect things to go wrong, so getting there a couple of hours early lets us watch TV, relax and wait for the flight. Also, checking your bag means we don’t care if we are first or last to board the plane. I promise you, the annual fee is made up for in comfort, travel points, and food/drinks. You can easily spend up to $12 to $20 on coffee, snacks and drinks at the kiosks in airports. We’ve used it in London and Athens and I’m sure we’ll use it in Cairo when we leave.
Another tip that may help is to book seats on the aisle and window for your flight. Preferably on rows 20 or further back. People won’t select middle seats when booking their flight, and if its not full, you and your travel partner may have the row to yourself. If not, people will always swap a middle for an aisle or window seat. This works at least 50% of the time for us.
I’ve mentioned before that we picked up a Vodafone hot-spot for data access. In Cairo, I was able to pick up a new SIMM chip and buy 20 Gbps of data for about $28 in the airport. That was a big relief. Now we have Internet immediately in a new country.
Last, if you don’t have a car picking you up, don’t take an offer from the guys inside the airport. They may be nice, and definitely persistent, but they are too much. Just go to the taxi stand. Negotiate the rate to your destination (which may be pre-determined by law) and go. We liked the metro in Athens, it was great and very cost-effective.
No matter what you do…….travel days suck.
Back in Athens
We took an early flight out of Heraklion. We flew Aegean Airlines (which I like) from Crete back to Athens. We had a 7:40 departure from Athens to Cairo the next day so we booked into the Sofitel Airport (for a rate that I normally would reject) so that we could just lug our luggage (funny how that name fits carrying heavy objects) right to the ticket counter and check-in.
Good plan. The only problem is you are stranded at the airport and we had an entire day to kill. We had nothing we wanted to do in the Plaka, so we decided to go to the mall to pick up odds and ends, and Ellen thought I needed a haircut (there goes the pony-tail). Here’s the issue….the metro is 10 Euros to get one-way into the heart of Athens, but its more pricey if you want to stop off on locations on the commuter rail. It was 9 Euros each. Now, we could use the metro ticket and change trains, but that would add about an hour on our trip to the mall we’d pick to visit. Cabs are worse, it was 28 Euros to the mall, but they would take us to the Plaka for 35 Euros, which is crazy since it would take an hour longer to get there.
I give up, we did the metro for 36 Euros round trip.
We got to the mall, and it was nice. It was billed as the largest mall in Europe, but Dallas malls may be double its size. There were no hair salons in the mall, so my potential pony-tail dream is intact. Ellen was able to purchase a few items she found wanting in her wardrobe, but I found a gem.
Classic Cars! They had a modest collection of some really cool cars from the 60s, 70s, and 80s there. Pictures attached. So, while we didn’t accomplish everything on Ellen’s list, I had a great time. After all, its all about me isn’t it?
On our return to the hotel, we just holed up and prepared for tomorrow. You really feel isolated out here. We were able to Hi-jack the hotel feed to the TV and stream American TV to watch, so we promptly loaded British TV from Netflix and watched our new favorite show Wallander and prepared to leave Greece. We’ve had a wonderful two months here. I highly recommend this country to everyone.
Tomorrow, we go to a new continent.