Andros Update: Part 1

After two days of hiding from the blizzard in our room, Julie and I awoke this morning to find the sun shining down on a lovely 50 degree day here on the beautiful island of Andros.

As we wait for the bus back to Gavrio, where we will catch the ferry to Rafina and then another bus to Athens, I happened to chance upon a random wifi signal in the middle of the town plaza.

So, in as few words as possible, here is what has transpired since landing in Greece Saturday morning:

Our flight left Frankfurt around 9:30pm on Friday, arriving at Athens International at around 1:30am local time on Saturday. With little money and no cheap place to stay nearby, Julie and I resigned ourselves to spending the night in the airport.

We found some benches in the lower level of the airport and I managed to pull another set of benches close enough to be able to put our feet up on. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to fall asleep and someone had to stay up to watch our bags so, I chose not to sleep that night. Luckily, Julie was able to get a few hours of sleep in as I passed the time studying a map of Athens, reading and taking pictures. It was a long, rough night for me, but I managed to push through and also find a direct bus from the airport to Rafina, which we took at 8:50am Saturday morning.

We arrived in Rafina around 9:30am, we were the only ones on the bus. As soon as we stepped off the bus, we were hit with the strong scent of ocean and fish, so far so good! We walked through the small fish market of the little port city and located the ferry services store front. We bought our tickets for a 5:30pm and suddenly realized we had a whole day to kill in a city that appeared to be completely abandoned for the winter. The whole feeling of being there was very much like being at the Jersey shore in the winter. We decided to explore and bit and then spend the day cafe-hopping. We met a couple of friendly locals who all asked the same question:

"What are you doing in rafina? why are you going to andros at this time of year? don't you know it's supposed to snow tomorrow?"

Of course we didn't really have an answer for any of those questions.

The day passed and we boarded the ferry around 5pm. I had still not slept a minute since Thursday night.

To be continued....(bus is about to begin boarding)