20 hours of traveling is surprisingly (not surprisingly) long. Very long. Andrea and I wondered if we’ve ever really been so tired before. Myself (Matt), I’ve been on a plane for about 17 hours in a row, but that was a cake walk in comparison. 20 hours divided between 4 airports, 3 different flights, 2 carriers, and 1 long sprint across Charles De Gaulle (Paris) was truly exhausting. Our first leg took us from Seattle to Paris and kept us in the air for about 10 hours. We had dinner early in the flight, somewhere over Canada (beef…stuff) and breakfast somewhere over the Atlantic, just short of the UK (yogurt, muffin, fruit cup, eggs, OJ).
During the flight we watched Leatherheads (bleh, Andrea: 1.5 stars, Matt: 1.5 stars), Iron Man (Andrea: 3 stars, Matt: 3.5 stars), What Happens in Vegas (Surprisingly, Andrea: 3 stars, Matt: 3 stars), and we didn’t quite get a chance to finish our 4th film (Andrea: Horton Hears a Who, Matt: The Kite Runner). Andrea’s already seen it before, but she’d like to remind everyone she gives Horton a whopping 4.5 stars.
We landed in Paris and ran clear to the other side of the airport, through a passport check and 2 different security checkpoints. The flight from Seattle had come in a bit late, so what should have been an hour and a half layover became 30 minutes to cross CDG. If you’ve never been, it’s a sprawling, massive airport, and we just made it. We got on our plane bound for Athens. Our luggage did not (we didn’t know this yet).
Matt and I arrived at the Athens airport with an hour till our connecting flight. The airport was a complete culture shock; it was dirty, (I saw pee on the floor by one gate), the bathrooms were dirty and had only one stall each, and everything stunk. When we arrived at our gate there was no sign confirming we were in the correct location; after traveling for so many hours my mood was not great and the longer we sat with no information the more worried I became. Boarding time arrived and finally someone arrived and ushered us onto a bus that took us out to our plane. We were finally on our way to Crete.
The flight from Athens to Crete was extremely short, just 40 minutes long. Our plane landed and unlike Athens the airport was slightly more updated and catered to visitors. Matt and I quickly found the baggage claim and waited for our luggage. Matt and I are patient people, but after seeing everyone from our plane get their luggage and leave, and then the next flight arrived from Warsaw and received their luggage, we knew we had a problem. At the lost and found we discovered our name had been called (but honestly, she was so soft spoken we wouldn’t have known what she was saying anyway). Our bags were still back in Paris. At this point I thought of Amine, and his bitter hatred for Air France, but we remained optimistic. The bags should be coming in around 10 PM that night, or early the next morning at the latest.
We caught a cab for the Village Heights Golf Resort. I still don’t know how much that cab ride SHOULD have been, but based on the fare map near the cab stand, probably somewhere around 28-30 Euros. We paid 35, which isn’t so bad. Such is life; we don’t speak Greek, and our cabbie certainly didn’t know English. I’m just happy he knew where we were going. There isn’t much in the way of addresses or street names in Crete. Hell, the water park we were given a flyer for at the airport has GPS coordinates on it.
The staff at Village Heights was very friendly. Andrea was given a pretty pink rose, and we got into our apartment, 2102. Minutes later they delivered a neat little “Happy Anniversary” card to our room (they didn’t seem to have anything honeymoon related). This card may have been made in Publisher. 🙂 Crete is beautiful, this place is beautiful, we are exhausted, and couldn’t be less interested right now. We went to sleep around 6 PM, hoping our luggage would find its way safely to us while we slept.
matt & andrea 