Travel day. Goes off pretty seamlessly. Early, but seamlessly. Airport shuttle, right on time. Check in, fine. At the lounge with tons of time to spare for our 9:45am flight. We order cappuccino and the Barista expertly supplies us with this:

Quite the fitting way to leave Ireland with a shamrock.

First flight is fine, on time, etc. We’ve only a little over an hour to kill in the Frankfurt airport, and by the time we walk through passport control and down the long, long, long concourse toward our gate, we don’t have too much time cooling our heels. Although we are hungry, so we stop at a little kiosk in the concourse for a kielbasa and a pretzel sandwich and beer – which we can just walk through the terminal with in our hands, drinking whenever. Welcome to Germany! Unfortunately they don’t have wine though, so we find a place to sit and I find a little convenience store and buy an excellent little bottle of reasonably priced wine. Oh – we are definitely doing this again when we fly home through here in June!

We’re still a ways from the gate, so snack completed, we head down the concourse. Once there and in line to board I realize, to my horror, that I have lost my rain jacket! No! I left it on the chair next to us when we ate and never thought to pick it up. Crap! I run back to the seating area (which is a ton farther than I remembered) only to find….an empty row of seats. Damn it. While I might have had time to run back here, I definitely do not have time to go to the service desk for lost and found. Crap, crap, crap.

Well that puts me in a mood – I can tell you. Nothing I can do about it now, and i know that’s not the worst thing that could ever happen, but still.

After that, everything was smooth yet again. Even though our flight was 40 minutes late, our Welcome Pickup driver was right there – and she was the same driver we had in November when we sailed out of Piraeus, so it was like old home week. Took us forever to get there with traffic, but eventually we made it, found our apartment and contact to get inside, and made ourselves at home. Another really nice little apartment with two great balconies on the front and the back, right in the middle of Piraeus. Sort of reminded us of Chiang Mai with all the different levels of maintenance around – and the smells and the sights!

After quickly stowing our gear, we headed out to the grocery store for supplies, then out once again for dinner at Street Souvlaki – a great little restaurant with, yeah, pretty obvious, souvlaki! We settled into the patio – listening to the bats in the trees around us – and ordered a baked feta and 2 souvlaki pitas which were like Primanti Brothers sandwiches, piled high with French fries (that I immediately deconstructed and separated so i could just have the pita sandwich on its own!).

An excellent way to start off our Greek Intensive cruises. It was dirt cheap, and somehow we didn’t get charged for the 2nd beer Ed ordered. Even better.  

Walking off dinner sounds like good idea, so we make our way to the marina to scope out restaurants for tomorrow night. Plenty of good options, we’ll go with the flow. Then it is back to our great balcony for a night cap, and calling it a night. Can’t believe we into our 6th week of traveling now. Seems like yesterday we were arriving in Cape Town….