Our European Adventure

Worst day of the trip so far. Dragged ourselves out of bed early to make sure we arrived at the airport two hours before our planned departure time of 11am. Okay, not a big deal. YET. At our boarding gate, we learnt that there was a trade union meeting of all ground personnel from 10-12 but that we would be able to board our plane at 12:30 at the latest. Not a huge delay, a bit annoying but we weren’t in a hurry so we weren’t overly worried.

12:30 came and went.

We were offered a free lunch voucher at the airport and a voucher for a free Rome-Athens or Athens-Rome flight that could be used any time over the next year. As if. I’d prefer they gave us ten bucks.

Anyway, apparently another union meeting had been scheduled for 2-4pm, which nobody knew about. And then the story went that the meeting would go until 6pm. And so on until about 9:30 when we finally boarded our plane after nearly 13 hours of patient waiting in the scummy airport! Oh, gross, we were feeling so stinky and crap. By about dinner time I wandered into the perfume store and wafted about half a bottle of Armani Idole over myself before casually walking back out. (Mel did this later at the Athens airport, then spotted an old Italian guy from our flight doing the exact same thing! Ha!)

Saphira made friends with a couple of cuties who were also waiting, which meant there was plenty of “kid noise” around us all afternoon.

So… apparently the problem was that our flight was all set to go except they had nobody to drive the bus. THE BUS! It was seriously a 30 second bus ride. We could have walked and loaded our own luggage onto the plane in about 45 minutes, but hey. Let’s wait 13 hours for the pros to do it!

As we were boarding the plane we were informed that while we were finally on our way to Athens, our luggage wasn’t. (All this information was, of course, translated to us through other passengers, as there was no announcement made – in any language – only different stories coming from different personnel, none of them accurate). So once we were in Athens, we still had to wait another hour or so at the airport for our luggage to arrive on another plane. Sigh…

Bla bla bla, we got to our hotel after midnight, and, oh dear! Whoops! The booking we’d made WEEKS ago had only been faxed the previous day and, what a shame, the hotel was fully booked! So we had to walk to another hotel that they had kindly booked for us. What a joke! This was nuts. I was about to lose it and start yelling and screaming and waving my arms about (like a true Italian) but was too exhausted and basically just fell into bed.