Docked into LHR and settled in for a six hour layover. We had options when we bought the tickets to do either a one-hour layover or a six-hour layover, and there seemed to be a lot of ways a one-hour layover could go wrong. Better to be safe and get breakfast and be … leisurely about it.
Food on the plane was questionable (especially what passed for a “bacon sandwich” that they served for breakfast) so first order of business was finding some sustenance. Every food place in the airport serves a full English breakfast, so we picked one of them and got some coffee and a big plate of goodness.
Tattie scones even, or what passes for them in an airport.
(Heather just got fried potatoes. Not a fan of baked beans I guess.)
Grabbed a necessary universal plug converter since we failed to bring any of ours with us.
LHR <rocket emoji> ATH
Breezed through passport control, luggage retrieval, the rental car counter, and after some overcomplication on my part of the instructions to the rental car pickup lot, we set off in our tiny Nissan for our hotel for the night, the hotel Seasabelle. One thing I didn’t know about Athens was its proximity to the coast of Greece, so it turns out that half of the “airport adjacent hotels” are beachside in little Ashtabula-sized coastal towns. We got upgraded to a beach view room and ate a dinner from the gyro place next door out on the terrace.
A very quick word about English. I am no longer shocked when every person in a new foreign country speaks English — most of them speak three or four languages and their definition of “a little” makes them more fluent than most American fourth graders. But I’m unsure here what tagged me as an English speaker, even though I was not at all prepared to be speaking Greek to anyone — the rental car desk operative, the hotel concierge, the gyro counter staff, the waitresses in the hotel restaurant all somehow sussed me out and spoke English to me to start the conversations. I don’t know if it was my pale complexion or my comfortable sweatshirt or what. It definitely wasn’t my shoes though.
This is also the moment where I start wondering exactly how inexpensive living in Greece is going to be. Two gyros, two gigantic boxes of french fries, two sodas cost fourteen euros. That would have cost forty dollars in the US easily.
We left the doors to the veranda open and slept to the soft sound of the waves of the Aegean.