March 28-31: Back home for a while

Another historical post...

My scheduled hiatus from travel started with my return trip from Crete. In an attempt to break a record for the longest day, I woke up around 4:30a to catch a 5:00a taxi to the airport. My flight was scheduled to leave at 7:30, so I figured I should be at the airport a couple of hours early... WHAT was I thinking?? The airport in Hania doesn't even open until 6:00a. I got there and had to wait around for about 30 minutes until the ticket counters opened. Once they did open, I was informed that the second leg of my trip, from Athens to London had been cancelled. They were happy to inform me that they had rescheduled me on the next flight that left Athens at 1:30p and would arrive London 3:30p local time. Apparently they were completely oblivious to the fact that I was supposed to fly out of London at 3:30p. I told them this... in typical Greek fashion, the guy at the ticket desk shrugged his shoulders and handed me my ticket for the 1:30p flight to London. I guess he just didn't care or figured it wasn't his problem.

I ended up getting on the flight to Athens where I had to pick up my bags. I then spent forever on the phone with American Express travel... at times staffed by the least competent people around... I had called them from Hania and again from Athens while waiting for my bags. Both times they told me that they couldn't find any way for me to get home that day. It was 7:30a in Athens... I couldn't believe there wasn't any flights that could get me home. At the end of both calls, the person told me that they'd keep working on it and for me to call back at the next chance. On my third call, I was again told there was no route home... finally, after almost an hour, the lady figured out that there was in fact a Lufthansa flight from Athens to Frankfurt, then from Frankfurt to Chicago, then on to Colorado Springs. DUH!!! Why couldn't they find that 2 hours earlier. After we were done, I walked the 100 ft to the Lufthansa desk and checked in. What a waste of time!!

After that mess, I jumped on the train to downtown Athens and did a quick run around the Acropolis. I didn't really have time to go in (or want to pay the 12 Euro for a ticket and only spend 20 minutes inside). Below is a merged image from the street below the Acropolis. I figured I would have time to see everything when I brought Athena back to Greece in a month.

View from below the Acropolis

View of Parthanon from below

After my quick tour, I jumped back on the train and headed toward the airport... as it turns out, the trains that go that direction don't all go to the airport. I ended up having to wait 20 minutes at one of the stations for the next train to the airport. Below is a picture from inside the station... they had hung rocks from the ceiling in some kind of strange "art". I cranked up the saturation a little to bring out the blues of the stones.


Metro station outside Athens

I managed to make it back to the Athens airport and jumped on the flight to Frankfurt. I then had to figure out how to get from one side of the Frankfurt airport to another. It seemed like I walked 3 miles before I finally found my way to the HUGE security line to get to my flight. I got to the gate just as they were calling my name looking for me.

Lufthansa now offers Wi-Fi access on some of their flights... this one just happened to be one of them. For $25, I was able to connect and had full Internet access for the duration of the flight. I managed to connect to our Slingbox back home and watched some TV at 35000 feet. That was VERY neat. I had read about this ability on one of the Slingbox forums when I first got the Slingbox at Christmas. For those of you that don't know, a Slingbox is a device that you connect to your Dish/DirecTV/Tivo device. You then connect it to your high-speed Internet connection and configure everything. When the software installed on your laptop, you can watch shows that you've recorded at home from anywhere in the world... or over it. I've used the Slingbox from Japan, Singapore, Naples, Greece, and even from 35000 feet... it works great! It allows me to keep up with some TV when I have time... I still end up with tons of TV to watch when I get home.

So, after 27 hours of travel, I finally arrived in Colorado Springs. Home at last and for 4 weeks to boot!!

March 25-26: Touring around Crete

As previously mentioned... this is a historical post from a few months ago.

I was in Crete for a week and had a weekend to see some sites.  Saturday the 25th was the celebration of Greek independence day.  My coworker (Hou) and I hung around the city of Hania and watched the parade.  It seems that the entire region got together for the parade... they had all of the emergency services, schools, and military represented.  Hou and I watched the whole thing... afterwards we grabbed a gyro and then headed out to see some more of the island.  We drove from Hania to the western part of the island. 

As we left Hania, we followed the national "highway"... basically a wide two-lane road with no enforced rules... passing is perfectly acceptable at any time.  We reached the end of the official highway at a small town, Platanias.  Just outside of the town was a small church built into a cave.  Hou and I stopped to take pictures of the church and discovered that it had a tunnel that went under the road to the sea. Below are a couple of pictures from that pit stop.

Coastline of Crete

Church in a Cave

Continuing west, we reached the town of Platanos where we decided to follow a sign that marked some ancient ruins.  We drove through a very small town with narrow streets.  As we emerged from the other side, we were treated to an amazing view of the valley, mountains, and sea.  We stopped and took pictures and video of the area.  Hou and I decided that we should buy the restaurant that they were building and turn it into a retirement home and then retire there.  Below is the panorama of the view.  We wanted down into the valley and took a look at the ruins, then drove over to a small beach... probably a nice place to visit in the middle of summer.  From the beach, we headed back up the hillside and ended up driving inland through a bunch of small villages and towns until we came back around to Palatnis and eventually back to Hania.  A very good day of driving for sure.

Retirement home

Beach North of Retirement Home

On Sunday, we were treated to an unexpected surprise... daylight savings time.  Hou and I had agreed to meet around 10:00a.  I came downstairs for breakfast thinking it was 9:00... the food was gone and being cleaned up.  Usually breakfast runs until 10:00.  When I went back upstairs to my room, I noticed that the clock on the phone showed that it was an hour later than I thought.  Hou and I ended up meeting at 11:00... this should have been our clue that the day wasn't going to go well.  We had planned on going to Iraklion to see the Palace of Knossos.
Hou and I left Hania around 11:30.  We stopped for lunch at a small taverna about half way to Iraklion and had a pretty nice lunch.  The taverna had a very nice view of the green valleys full of olive trees.  As previously mentioned, Crete has a very diverse terrain... the coastline has beaches and inland is a mixture of rocky mountains and green valleys.  This is an example of the green valleys...


Green Valley - View from Taverna

After lunch, we continued to Iraklion where we followed the signs to Knossos.  We figured we had to be close since it was only 5 km from the highway.  The entrance was apparently blocked by a bus as we drove by it, so we never even saw it.  We ended up driving south to the interior of the island and eventually made our way around a very large valley to a monastery that had a museum of religious artifacts from way back in 1970... seemed odd.  From the monastery, we came back up the valley and ended up cutting across the middle.  We decided to drive up to the top of Minoan Peak to see if we could see much of a view.  Of course it turned out to be very cloudy at the top, so not much of a view.  We tried to go up to the archeological site there but it turned out to be closed.

View from 1/2 way up Minoan Peak

View from top of Minoan Peak

After an adventurous drive down the mountain, where I taught Hou how to drift around turns using the hand break :), we headed back towards Iraklion.  We decided to take a look at an ancient aqueduct that was marked on the side of the road.  We drove off the main road down a dirt road.  After wandering around and taking a few pictures, we headed back out.  On the way back out, I took a wrong turn.  We ended up coming out onto the main road in a different spot.  Right in front of us was a small hand written sign that said "Knossos Palace Parking 100m ->"  We accidentally found the palace!!  We got to the entrance at 5:20p.  The palace had closed at 5:00.  As I said before, that was just how the day had gone.

We left the palace and headed into Iraklion.  After about 30 minutes of going in circles, we finally found our way out of the town... the signs were very confusing and NOT helpful... plus we didn't have a map of the city.  SO, in a whole day of driving, we ended up not really seeing anything as planned.
Better luck next time...