My friend Pat and I had not seen each other in nine years, yet when during a phone conversation last May, she suggested traveling to Greece with me, I jumped at the opportunity.
I picked her up at the Portland airport, and we were treated to dinner by my friend Marty, who wanted to meet this crazy woman from Utah I’d told him so much about.
Our reunion was filled with laughter and eager anticipation of our adventure. Our plane departed the next morning, and I’m not sure either of us got much sleep.
We flew fr
om Portland to Washington DC, where I made my last calls and text messages before turning my phone completely off for the duration of our 10-day tour.
The longest leg of our journey was from Washington DC to Frankfurt, then a much-shorter flight from Frankfurt to Athens, and suddenly, just 15 hours on our bodies since we got up that morning, but 25 hours of lapsed time due to crossing 10 time zones, we arrived IN GREECE!
The tour company provided our transportation to the hotel, at 1 p.m. Athen’s time, and we had a couple hours to “acclimate” ourselves before the Tour Overview meeting and Welcome Dinner that evening.
Although neither one of us had gotten much rest on the flights over, Pat and I immediately set off to do a little sight-seeing and get our bearings around the hotel.
Then we met our fellow travelers for the first time. Two full-sized buses, filled mainly with people from the United States and Canada, would be traveling “together” for the duration of our adventure,
and we had two tour guides, Mary and Karen, who both spoke pretty darn good English.
Pat and I were on “Bus 1” with Mary, a curly-haired native of Athens, although we were almost always grouped together as a massive 90+ horde of tourists!