Our final morning on the cruise, we had to be up and out of our room by 8:30am, so we headed up to the breakfast buffet before going to wait in the Royal Theatre for our bus that would take us to the city center of Athens. We ended up waiting until almost 10:30 to get off the ship, but we were fine with the slower start to the day! We walked around the ship to soak in a few last views, and we ran into a ship photographer who knew just how to pose us for a goodbye photo with my phone. We can't say enough wonderful things about the staff on our ship! They were incredible!
On our Shuttle bus, we drove by some beautiful beaches in Piraeus, along the Greek coast.
We also saw some more of the famous blue-dome topped churches along the way. This one is the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas and was beautiful!
It was very neat to drive under the Temple of Olympian Zeus's gateway as we entered Athens!
Once we arrived in downtown Athens, we set off to find a place to store our luggage for the day, and we hit the jackpot when I walked into a hotel to ask for recommendations. They offered to check our bags in with them (I obviously kept our passports close to me at all times), offered us cold water, a free bathroom (most public bathrooms in Europe cost 50 cents), and an air-conditioned building to come and wait in when we wanted!
We set out to find the Acropolis, and while we waited for our ticket time, we grabbed lunch at another lovely Greek restaurant (with more room temperature water)...
I went with some cold Prosecco instead...
Emily decided to try another pizza, and while it wasn't as good as the one in Turkey, she was happy with her choice!
Ben, Abby, & I got some Greek chicken burritos, and Brian tried the authentic moussaka.
When it was our time to head to the Acropolis, I was too hot to trek up the mountain, so Brian took the kids while I did some shopping. They weren't gone very long before meeting back up with me, and everyone said it was WAY too hot to make it up to the top. BUT... you're never going to believe who they ran into while walking around... Yup!!! Sarah and Paul. After one final goodbye to them, Brian snapped a few pictures along the way, but we were going to have to be ok with the big sites being seen from a distance...
Abby was feeling sick at this point with heat stroke, so we got her a cooling towel, some cold-ish water, & Emily made some water bottle "showers" for them. We can understand now why they have been closing the Acropolis many days due to the historic heat wave across Europe.
We are going to miss all of our European flip-top, environmentally conscious water bottles!
We went back to sit in the air conditioned hotel we had found so Abby could cool down and her sweat-soaked shirt could start drying out. We decided to get some taxis at that point to take us to our hotel for the evening, and we did it in the knick of time- After the call to the taxis, the hotel lost all of its power (including the coveted air conditioning) due to power surges in the heat wave. It was definitely time to get out of there and start our long trek home!
Our hotel was an "interesting" family cottage, with a few broken beds, strange couches to sleep on, and a super-powerful shower, but the air conditioning worked, and they brought us a home-cooked dinner to our room, so we were thrilled!
We all turned in early, which wasn't hard to do after all the walking we'd done and all the sun we had gotten! We had to be up at 3am to get ready for the airport run to begin our nearly 24 hour trek home!
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