Meteora/Athens

Today is our last day and the group seems to be happy to be ending the trip. This has been a good holiday but as usual, we’re ready to get home. Hurricane Irene is presently impacting the North Carolina coast and moving northward so we’ve been closely watching the weather on the east coast. As expected, we learned this morning that our flight from Amsterdam to Boston had been cancelled! We tried to contact Delta/KLM online, but the website wouldn’t allow us to change destinations outside the northeast U.S., and they were all shut down because of the storm. We were thinking that if we could get a flight to Atlanta, things would work out well. Then, we found a local number in Greece for Delta/KLM. When nobody answered, we found out that they only work Monday – Friday. This was Saturday morning! Plan B was to wait until we got to Athens and either go to the airport and try to change our flight or to purchase an international SIM card and call the 1-800 Delta number. When things like this happen, it makes you really appreciate all the 24/7 services we have in the U.S. We sometimes forget that the rest of the world isn’t like this. You may get someone from the Philippines when you call, but at least they answer the telephone. There is some comfort and speaking to a live agent.




While in route from Meteora to Athens, Maria, our tour leader used her cell phone to call the Athens airport and got someone from KLM on the phone for us. When we asked about a flight to Atlanta, we were told that there were no seats available. Although the agent was helpful, she basically only answered yes or no and, not being familiar with U.S. geography, was unable to make any suggestions. After several rounds of questions and receiving “No”, I finally found out that there was a direct flight from Amsterdam to Memphis! We would stay on our original 5 a.m. flight from Athens, and would not depart Amsterdam until 2:10 p.m. What luck! We dropped one leg of our journey and we now had time to leave the airport an see Amsterdam (at least for 2-3 hours) and still connect with our original flight from Memphis to Muscle Shoals at get home by 8:40 p.m.!!!!


Needless to say, we were much more relaxed on the remainder of our long bus ride to Athens. After checking into our hotel, (Hera Hotel), we visited the Plaka and flea market in Athens. Tonight was the farewell dinner and we were scheduled to have dinner with our fellow ship mates (from the “other” group). However, our wakeup call was scheduled for 1 a.m. so we opted to skip the dinner and try to get a few hours of sleep.