Day 17: Athens -> Munich -> Denver -> Home

Saturday, September 29

We were awake when Saturday began in Athens, which was 10 hours before it began in Seattle, which meant our Saturday was 32 hours long.

We were camped out by the McDonald's on the second level of the Athens airport. Daniel put some chairs together and slept a bit at one point. There was a television that had on subtitled English television programs, like 'Nip/Tuck' and 'Cold Case'. I mainly did crosswords.

We went to get our luggage around 3:30AM. Were able to check in right after that, but it was still forever until our flight. We headed to the gate. There were shops near security, but we didn't realize there was nothing open past security. We took turns sleeping at the gate.

It was another airport where we boarded a shuttle bus to go to our plane. It was still dark out when we boarded, so we got to see sunrise from the plane. We weren't that far behind sunrise for much of our trip, although our stop in Munich put it out a bit. We had breakfast but otherwise slept.

We wound up not having any time between flights, so it was one gate to the next. Our Munich->Denver flight was on Lufthansa, which was celebrating Oktoberfest. We had a pretty large meal. Our flight also had 'Spiderman 3' and 'Shrek 3' on it. For a change, I slept more than Daniel. We also took ample advantage of the free liquor. Our second meal before landing was small relative to the first.

We had to go through customs in Denver, which meant going through passport control (we didn't have much time between flights, so we were well ahead of most of our fellow passengers), getting our luggage, going through another check point, rechecking our luggage, and then needing to change terminals and go through security. The line for security had more than a 10 minute wait when we got into it, and was just very frustrating.

The flight to Seattle was operated by United, and seemed shabby compared to the rest of our travels. We were given beverages and a bag of pretzels. I had the window seat but wasn't able to see much due to clouds.

At Sea-Tac, we found Judy immediately. She was also picking up friends who were supposed to have gotten in 40 minutes before us but whom she still hadn't found. Then it was waiting for the luggage. I got Daniel's almost immediately. Turned out he got mine. Luckily, we figured that out pretty quickly. When we got to the meeting space, Judy had found her friends, so we just needed to find Jack with the car.

I got my stuff from the house and we just headed to Daniel's. Went to dinner at the Bean Flower restaurant near his house. The sun set while we were there. We watched taped television in an attempt to stay up as late as possible, but gave up once we finished the episode where, near the end, I fell asleep while fast-forwarding through the commercials. I think we crashed around 9:30PM, 29+ hours after our Saturday had begun.