So, Wednesday ifinsihed thecbesutiful ride along the coast and got picked up at Xylokastro. On the ride back to Athens, the organizer kept saying it looked like it would rain the next day, and do I really want to ride out to the temple of Poseidon. I said if it wasn’t a downpour, I was going. The organizer was going to ride with me. That was the deal, in writing.
I got dropped off at the hotel, which was in a lovely location. From the rooftop restaurant you can see the Acropolis from one side and the temple of Zeus from the other. I slept well, woke up the next morning and.....it was raining and very windy. I go up to breakfast, come back down and my phone is ringing. It’s the organizer. She refuses to ride her bike. Ok, but you’re going to take me out there with the bike on the car rack and if it clears up I will ride back in. She was trying to think of all sorts of objections to that idea. I told her to knock it off, I was a paying customer. So , while I was waiting for her downstairs, one of the bellboys was talking to me about the ride out there. He has also done it on the bike and he thought the winds would make it difficult and danger. I was glad to hear a non-confusing explanation for once. In any case , I got picked up and we drove out of Athens to the temple of Poseidon. It rained the entire way and was windy. So when we got there, she stayed in the car and I walked up to the site in the wind and rain and tried to take some pictures without letting my phone get too wet. When I got back to the car, it was raining so hard, there was no way I was going to ride the bike for 30 miles. It was coming down in torrents. Dirt and gravel were washing across the road from the hillside and some of the puddles were so deep we had to crawl through it. But I was not going to sit in the hotel all day!
When we finally got back into town, she dropped me off at the national archaeological museum. I spent two hours there and then took the metro back to the hotel where I had left my suitcase. I ran into that same bellboy again and told him how bad the weather had been. It would have been a beautiful ride if the sun had been shining. I rain into the bathroom to change out of my bike clothes and put on warm stuff because I knew it was going to be cold when I hit Kazan. Then I debated whether I should quickly hit one more museum but decided against it. Enough is enough. So I hope on the metro and took it all the way out to the airport. It was only about 5 and I wasn’t going to leave until after midnight, but the great thing about airports is that I get a lot of reading done.
We were just getting ready to board for the first leg to Moscow. Everyone was coming along with his/her duty free bags of liquor. All of a sudden I hear a crash and one guy has dropped his bag on the floor. Fortunately the plastic bag didn’t rip so he was able to deposit broken glass and alcohol in the nearest waste can. And that was really a waste.
I slept a little on the plane. We got into Moscow and I got through customs and security pretty quickly. Then It was another long wait. I nodded off a little bit. They finally started checking us in and then they loaded us on one of the buses to take us out to the plane because it was parked way over in the north forty! And, of course it was snowing in Moscow. But, it was a smooth ride and everything worked out well.
We landed in Kazan in a snowstorm with temps well below freezing. I text Ravil to order my taxi and all of a sudden I hear someone say, “Where are you coming from?” It was Paul. We had been on the same plane and didn’t even realize it. He had connected from Ireland. We decided to share the taxi. I grab my suitcase, and wouldn’t you know it, Paul’s suitcase never made it on the plane. So we had to go to the lost luggage office before we left the airport. They told him they would deliver it to him tomorrow.
So, I went and got water and froze my ha das doing it, I got two loads of wash done, my suitcase unpacked, I went to the little store for some basics, I studied some Russian and started a 1000-piece puzzle that Sonia had given me for my birthday. I figured I
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