We picked up Brett and Jess then picked up Steve and headed to airport. Steve took our car back to his house and will get it to Dave when he comes into town. The plan is to have Dave use the car while he is in town and we are gone. Dave will park the car at the airport when he flies back home, which is just a few hours before are supposed to arrive. So it will only need to be parked at the airport for a couple hours. We brought an extra key fob with us, so Dave can lock his key in the car when he parks it. I think it’s a great plan. I guess we’ll see how well it works over the next little while.

Our flight was delayed out of Atlanta. We sat on the plane for an hour without a/c while they worked on one of the engines. We eventually got going and had an uneventful flight. The plane landed about an hour later than scheduled, but it didn’t matter to us; we were just headed to our hotel to drop off bags before wandering the city.

We picked up our rental car, a white Mercedes A 160d that is super low to the ground and has all the controls for things in places I’m not used to. The parking break is a button, for example, and there are no wiper controls to the right of the steering wheel. It took me almost twenty minutes into the drive to figure out how to lower my seat so I could see out the front window. It does have quite a bit of power, so it’s not too terrible to drive, but it’s a manual transmission and getting it into reverse is tricky.

After getting settled in at the Windham Grand Athens hotel, we made our way to the Acropolis on foot. We walked all around there and then went through the museum of the same name. Both were very cool, but both are the type of places you need to see once and then probably never again.

I had this idea of the Parthenon in my head that turned out to be very wrong. I thought some of it had fallen apart, but that the stuff that is still standing was exactly that… still standing. But that’s not how it is. The Parthenon has been torn down, rebuilt, blown up, rebuilt, etc. I’m pretty sure everything standing there today has been restored or rebuilt at least once, but probably many times. But it’s still pretty cool to see and the rock carvings are just amazing. It is currently undergoing yet another restoration, so there are scaffolds around a lot of it and some cranes parked right inside while they do their thing.

We were really tired after the all-nighter we pulled getting here, so after walking back to the hotel around seven, we brushed our teeth and went to bed around eight. We slept pretty well until about five when the traffic outside the hotel started getting loud and somewhat crazy. It’s Sunday morning, but I guess traffic can happen anytime in a big city.

Our hotel in Athens is in a bit of a rough neighborhood, so I don’t want to go running early tomorrow morning.

Athens is a big city and for the most part doesn’t seem to have any sky scrapers. The city is just really spread out and all the buildings are white. It must get pretty hot here in summer, but it’s not hot right now – the highs are around 75 and the lows around 55. There are some once-nice buildings in disrepair after years without any maintenance, and everything is pretty beat up. There is graffiti everywhere, but the streets and sidewalks are pretty clean. They’re cracked and beat up, but they’re fairly clean for a city of this size.

We completely forgot about bringing our international plug converters, so we’ll either be buying one soon or wind up completely off the grid.