The Dream and the Travel

 

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Last fall, my daughter signed up to go to Japan through her school over spring break along with me as a chaperoning parent, only offered to those who are honor students with excellent GPA's. I was looking forward to it. However, not enough people signed up for it to make it economically feasible and so they offered it to anybody. My daughter was worried that doing so would open it up to troublemakers and thus making it not fun for those that want to be respectful and learn about a new culture. Now that they are back, word on the street has it that my daughter was right and they had lots of problems on the trip from kids getting into all kinds of trouble that affected everyone else. Fortunately for my daughter and I, we cancelled the trip in early winter while we were still able to get a full refund back.

Back then when my daughter was thinking about cancelling, we asked her if there was anyplace she would like to go to as a family instead before she graduates high school in a couple months. She immediately responded by saying she would love to go to Greece. So after some back and forth, we decided that we would fund her trip to Greece, with parents and sister in tow, if she planned out the entire trip. She took up the challenge and ran with it.

She even picked out flights which we booked before Christmas. To reduce the sticker shock somewhat and get better flights, we opted to drive five hours east to Chicago to catch our first flight instead of flying from our local urban jungle airport only 75 minutes up the road. Besides being cheaper and even faster considering layovers, it meant we would just have to make one connection each way, in Germany. It seemed like a good deal at the time until a week before we were to depart and German grounds workers, at the very airport we were going through, announced they were going to go on strike the very day we would be there.

This led to a week of untold anxiety of what we should do. Our airline even sent up free vouchers to rebook but every suitable option included a leg going through a German airport with striking grounds workers. To confuse matters, we weren't flying on any German airlines and it was only German airline grounds workers on strike. Nobody seemed to know if we would be affected or not. In the end, inaction ruled the day and we drove to the airport in Chicago not knowing what would happen.

We landed in Munich on time to a very lightly populated airport but our connecting flight was still on time and scheduled to take off soon. We sighed with relief and patiently waited until it was announced minutes before boarding that it would be delayed an hour. Why? We didn't know but at least it was still scheduled to take off at that point. An hour later we boarded but then we just sat there in the plane, at the gate, as the minutes ticked by. From what I could understand from all the German being spoke, because of the strike and lack of rescheduling options, we had to wait for some delayed passengers on other flights to arrive since stranding them in an airport on strike was not an option. Indeed an hour later 20+ kids from some school did arrive and we were able to take off.

We landed in Athens, Greece, two hours late and after numerous wrong turns and stops to ask for directions, we finally located the subway servicing the airport and made it onto the subway. For some reason, Greeks only feel the need to put a sign pointing out the direction of the train from the various airport terminals, only when you are within sight of the actual train. Until then it is assumed you know which direction to go. Due to the two hour delay of our plane, we arrived right during rush hour which meant that we spent 40 minutes standing upright being crushed by those around us on the subway car until we reached our stop, just as the daylight was fading from the sky. Jet lagged and tired, we just checked into our rental suite and called it a day.