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Last night we went to a nice dinner at Compass Rose and then put our bags outside the room by 10 pm. The next morning we grabbed a quick breakfast at La Veranda and then took our roll-a-board and carry bags and waited for our color to be called. We said goodbye to as many friends we could find and headed down to collect our bags.
We hailed a taxi, loaded all of our bags and headed downtown to our hotel. It was a pretty warm, somewhat hazy day and the drive on the freeway wasn’t particularly interesting. You could see some of the famous sites in the surrounding hills but the city itself was crowded, a mass of humanity, with nothing to write home about…or write about in a blog for that matter.
Here are the Top Pictures for Athens:
Click here for the complete Picture Gallery for Athens.
The King George hotel was very nice and directly across the street from the square where people had been shot the prior week during demonstrations against government cut-backs. It was also directly across from the Parliament building, complete with marching soldiers and changing of the guard ceremonies every hour. We checked in, left out bags with the bellhop and went out to get some lunch and do some sightseeing.
After exploring the subway system, which was very modern, we grabbed a taxi and headed to the Acropolis. It’s easy enough to read up on all the history of this area. Let’s just say that we did the “fast food” version of a tour of all the famous, crumbling ruins here. There was a lot of construction going on with many cranes, scaffolds and, honestly, many unsafe areas to walk. It was reasonably crowded, hot and, after taking a few pictures, we escaped the crowds and headed back the hotel. I guess you could say we felt that we had “been there, done that”.
Our hotel room was ready and it was very nice, with very high ceilings, nice bed, a TV that worked well and Margaret unpacked a bit and laid down for a nap. Dale went out to take some pictures of the changing of the guard and to explore the area around the hotel. That took less than an hour.
After a bit of a rest we headed to dinner at the hotel restaurant which had a lovely outdoor patio with a nice view of the Acropolis which, when lit up at night was rather impressive, albeit in the distance. The dinner was very nice and we were in bed by 9 pm, ready to take off in the morning for our long trip home.