Travel Day

 Remember when air travel was fun? It’s been awhile. Post-covid, it’s even rarer to honestly say, ‘getting there is half the fun.’
For the most part, our trip went relatively smoothly, but exhaustion and lack of sleep have taken their toll.

We arrived at Calgary Airport three hours ahead like good little boys and headed for the Maple Leaf Lounge, which was pretty crowded. They had an interesting selection of hot food to choose from: Alberta beef sliders, donair pizza, and chicken&waffle (!) Well, that’s eclectic. Both the pizza and sliders were good. Didn’t have the waffle. Then it was time to get this website set up and ready to go because I knew that I’d be way too tired after the trip to do all of that. Best to get all the prep work done ahead of time. Soooo glad I did!

Air Canada flies Dreamliners on overseas trips and the business class seats are really nice. Lots of legroom, seats that become beds, noise-cancelling headphones, the works.

Where Air Canada really excels, though, is the food. It was all really good, cooked properly (veggies were still crisp!), and there were some interesting flavours.

I know that some of you are going, “octopus??? Eww!” but it was actually really good.

I had the braised pork cheeks for my main, which was delicious. Rob had a cauliflower steak, which he said was good.

Breakfast was a nice assortment of cheese and fresh fruit, plus some mushy grey lump in a bowl that had coconut, raisins, and some other stuff in it, and was then sprinkled with some seeds of some kind. I went back up and re-read the menu now and it sounds delicious, but I couldn’t have identified much of that in the actual dish. No matter, I thought it was quite tasty. Rob didn’t like it much.

In spite of having the Dreamliner bed/seats, I didn’t get much sleep. Maybe a half hour at the most, if that. Not for lack of trying. I watched two movies: Jurassic World Dominion and Lightyear. Jurassic was a lot worse than I expected and I’m glad I didn’t pay to see it in a theatre. There was basically no plot and the novel concept of Dinos hanging out with us in everyday life isn’t nearly enough to sustain a movie for two-and-a-half hours. Lightyear, on the other hand, was way better than I expected. On the surface, it’s a little flat for a Pixar movie - but that’s a really high bar to meet already - but holy cow, the sheer number of inside jokes, callbacks, homages, and visual tributes to other movies is staggering. I saw references to Toy Story (duh), Star Wars, Tron, The Black Hole, and a host of other sci-fi films from my childhood. It’s clear that the writers and animators watched all the same movies that I did when they were kids and I had a blast picking out all the little references. I liked it a lot.

Eventually, we touched down in Frankfurt for a layover. Our bird was parked all the way at the end of one terminal and our connection was near the end of another one. Frankfurt airport is HUGE. We did a 2.3km walk between the two gates, with two sets of security areas to go through on the way, plus customs/passport control. We were more than ready for the lounge when we finally got to it.

It was at this point that we hit the first snag. The plane was late arriving in Frankfurt, so by the time we boarded, we’d missed our takeoff slot and sat on the tarmac for almost an hour before we could take off. Once in the air, however, there were some nice views of the Alps out the window.

Food on this flight was decent - Rob and I both had a Berliner Currywurst, a dish we first had in Berlin on our last trip. Its as good, and enhanced by the fact that we didn’t have to listen to multiple playings of Despacito by young girls with no talent for the violin.

Then, about two hours later, the Greek isles came into view.

After collecting our luggage, we got a taxi and discovered that Greeks are fairly insane on the roadways. I have often mentioned how harrowing it is to drive in Mexico, but the Mexicans have nothing on the Greeks. Tailgating, lane splitting, rapid lane changing, and speeding (at one point, our taxi was doing 122 in an 80 zone!) is the norm here. Oh, and when there’s a traffic jam, the taxi driver simply drove past everyone on the shoulder, even though it was barely wide enough for the car. We eventually made it to the Athens Marriott and got checked in. It’s a nice room.

It’s clean and comfy… except for the toilet, which has a square seat. Odd.

Even though we were both wiped out after about 12 hours on planes and an exhausting 45 minutes of butt-clinching and white-knuckling in the taxi, we decided to head up to the rooftop bar for a drink. We’d planned on ouzo, but they had run out, so the bartender suggested a mastika - a sweet liquor made from a local tree. It was pretty good.

And then we crashed. Hard. And that was it for travel day.

on to the next day!

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