A LOOOOOOOOOOOONG way

Monday 18th June

Well, turns out that it’s a bloody long way from Wellington to Athens! Still, girls who are staying in a flash hotel overlooking downtown Athens don’t complain J

The plane trip was…. long. That’s the only way to describe it. Happily, the woman sitting next to us on the Auckland / Hong Kong leg took herself off to business class so we had 3 seats to spread out in. Sadly, this didn’t happen on the hell Hong Kong / London leg… 13 hours is a loooooooooooong time!

In our quest to test airline food, we have discovered that Olympic has the worst food and chairs, by some distance. To be fair, we only have AirNZ to compare it to but there is no competition at this point. As we will be flying on 7 airlines during our trip, we’ll have a better basis for comparison is a week or two.

Despite being low on faith that we would make it, we did get all the way through to Athens without a problem. Amazingly, you don’t seem to need to clear customs if you arrive at 11:30pm… I’ll not make any smart remarks about what you could bring in or they might not let me out J

Marty has already observed that the roads in Athens are fantastic and they certainly seem to have no fear of toll roads- I think we passed 3 on the 20 minute trip from the airport. The Athenian taxi driver was extremely helpful and pointed out lots of flash hotels (and the odd historical site) on our way here… we had to look quickly, however, as he seemed to maintain his speed at about 140kph (not exaggerating, I promise!!).

Even with no sleep to speak of in the last 48 hours, Marty still woke up at 6:30am this morning. I think it might have been the excitement of the all-you-can-eat buffet. It was truly awe inspiring and I think Marty was tempted to stay until they tossed him out. After 36 odd hours of plane food, I ate fruit until it seemed rude to keep going. Oh, and I drank a little coffee…

The hotel we are staying in Divani Caravel (http://www.divanis.com/) is flash! They seem to anticipate my every need and even managed to have coffee on the table before I got back with food. We’re planning on making use of the roof top swimming pool later today and Marty has his eye on the gym. I think I might join the Europeans for a siesta about that time. Have I mentioned that it’s hot? It’s really hot! It was around 30 degrees at 9am… hot, hot.

Right, well, it’s our first day in Athens so it would be sad to sit here typing for too long…. Will try and post more later, hope you are all well, feel free to leave comments…

xxxr+m