Day 5 - Heading to Athens

Galaktobouriko: 1

Today began in the now traditional style of watching the sunrise while drinking coffee and eating (sadly Average) galaktobouriko.  

I've decided I'll have to change my test dessert.  The one I've chosen is too sweet to be eaten every day.   Also, it is a pain to type out the name every time.  I'll just eat a random pastry every day.

After the difficult start to the day, it was necessary to pack everything back into my suitcase.  Since arriving here I've bought a pair of sandals and two cakes of soap.  For some reason, my bags were much fuller than before.  I swear my clothes must have swollen in transit.

Jim then drove us to Tripoli for a light lunch before taking us all the way back to Athens.  On Moday we are starting a tour with Epos Travel.  It turns out they are based in Tripoli and on the drive back to Athens we went past turnoffs to towns that the tour will take us on. In hindsight, perhaps we should have joined the tour closer to home.  Poor Jim has covered around 700km picking us up from Athens and driving us back there, never mind all around the neighbourhood.

We are staying in a hotel on a pedestrianised street right in the middle of tourist central.  I'm loving it.  tt is so convenient to all the places we want to go.  Tomorrow we are doing a tour of the Parthenon and Acropolis with an archeologist.  It was going to start at 9am but it is going to be disgustingly hot tomorrow (34C) and there are 4 cruise ships coming into port so they moved the start time to 8am.  I'll take plenty of water and a broad brimmed hat.  Hopefully this will be sufficient to prevent heat stroke.

After checking into the hotel we went for a wander to identify where we are going to be picked up by Epos Tours and also where we need to go tomorrow for our Acropolis tour.  We only went mildly out of our way, so it was a pleasant outing.  On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a random cafe for an Aperol spritz to fortify ourselves.

Once we got back to the hotel we decided to have a wash and brief rest before heading out for dinner.  Our rooms are on the 4th (me) and 5th (Mary) floors.  The building has a tiny, slow lift.  For some reason we decided that it made sense to walk up the stairs rather than waiting for the lift.  We definitely needed a wash and rest when we finally made it to our rooms.   The spritz must have been more alcoholic than we realised.

For dinner we went to the Ella Restaurant.  It was about 5 minutes walk from the hotel.  However, when we got back to the hotel and looked down a side street we realised we'd walked around 3 sides of a block to get to it, instead of straight down the 4th side.  It is actually all of about 100 metres away.  Doh!

For dinner we just shared a variety of starter/mezze dishes.  We had an eggplant dip, fried calamari, zucchini fritters with a minty yoghurt sauce, meatballs in a tomato sauce and a dish of mashed fava beans with capers, plus bread of course.  It was all Good.  The waiters were professionally charming and flirtatious, so it was a pleasant evening all round.