Day 16: Athens

Friday, September 28

We wandered around looking for a place to grab some breakfast. Got something at a bakery and brought it back to the hotel. We swapped our books for different books from their collection. And then we gathered our stuff together to check out. Since our flight was at 7AM, we decided not to get a hotel since we would have had to have left it by 3AM. When Daniel had made the reservation, he'd been told we could leave our luggage at the hotel until the front desk closed, at 9PM. The woman there when we checked out said this was not the case, but gave us a place to try. It was near a place Lonely Planet listed. Her place didn't pan out, but walking to the other, we found a place that did take luggage and we could pick it up at 8PM.

We headed toward the Acropolis and found ourselves at the Roman Forum. Since it was one of the places you could get into on the same ticket as the Acropolis, we went. We then followed poor signage to the Acropolis, entering on the northerly side.

Athens was very hot our last day, so we tried to keep to the shade and hydrated regularly. We went around the Acropolis, seeing caves, theatres, stoas, shrines, and then the Parthenon. After that, we headed towards the Ancient Agora. Another site on the ticket was a cemetery, so we headed that way. Daniel started getting loopy, though, so we looked for a place to eat. Daniel wanted to try going down this one street, but we didn't' find anything. When we headed towards the metro tracks, we found the cemetery (which didn't seem that interesting) and then headed back towards what looked promising for food places. Ate at a fast-foody gyro place. It turned out the heat was getting to me, too, as I couldn't finish my food.

We sat there for quite awhile, and then decided to go to the National Archaeological Museum, which was indoors. Took the subway to Omonoia and walked up. Were there for hours walking around, taking sitting breaks. Headed out a little before 7 to walk back and head to get our luggage. It took no time and we were at the place at 7:30 but no one was there. This, of course, was something I'd feared in the back of my mind, especially as we hadn't said we were flying out the next morning. Thankfully, this guy next door said they'd be right back. I checked out a cafe just a few doors down while we waited, but we decided just to get to the airport once we got our luggage. The guy we were waiting for came back with his dinner, we got our luggage, and were off.

We took an express bus to the airport that gave us a bit of a tour of the city that we'd not seen. We got to the airport around 9PM. We were told our airline was closed. We got food (well, I got food and then later Daniel did) with the last of our Euros. Checked our luggage at some point. We'd talked to a guy who mentioned the area by the McDonalds on the second level was a good place to sleep. We got a table, but not one with a bench and settled in for the many hours until we could get our luggage and check in for our flight.