Interlude 1. Thessaloniki: September 4–6
Our trip started in North Carolina. Our wonderful friend Pat Kennedy generously agreed to drive us all the way to the Charlotte airport, which was immensely kind of him.
We have long favored flying direct from Charlotte to Munich to avoid domestic connections and be best positioned for transfers within Europe. So we took Lufthansa from Charlotte to Munich and then Aegean Air from Munich to Thessaloniki with a very short connection between flights.
Our Lufthansa flight to Munich was slightly delayed. We landed at the very minute our connecting flight to Thessaloniki began boarding.
In most airports, that would be a hopeless lost cause. Not so in Munich Flughafen! By refusing to despair and sprinting as much we could, we made it from our plane up two flights of stairs, through passport control, onto the little train between terminals, and onto our next plane while the door was still open. This was a good thing, because the next flight was 12 hours later; Munich is a nice airport, but 12 hours is a long time to sit around.
Alas, and not unexpectedly, our checked bags did not make that transition and failed to meet us in Thessaloniki. Ah well. We reported the lost bags and then caught a cab to our apartment.
We were staying in downtown Thessaloniki, near the waterfront and the commercial area.
The temperature was in the high 90s, but our place had efficient modern mini-air conditioners in every room and thick windows to keep out traffic noise. (We once spent a July week in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Paris; you can choose between suffocating from heat but having a relatively quiet room or opening the windows for some circulation, still sweating, but also hearing traffic all night long. Air conditioning is a great improvement to urban living!)
We really didn’t do much in Thessaloniki aside from recover from travel fatigue. We walked around the harbor when things cooled off in the evening.
We visited the statues of Alexander the Great and his dad.
We ate seafood. The first night, Chris was tired so I dined alone. The next night, the proprietor saved a special fish just for me!
We had only the clothes we’d travelled in, which grew annoying when our bags repeatedly failed to rejoin us. I grabbed a few new things for us at H&M, but that was no real solution. Finally, at the end of our second day in Thessaloniki, the baggage company informed us that the bags were definitely loaded on the evening flight. They would surely be delivered to our apartment sometime the next afternoon!
Ah, but our apartment would no longer be our apartment. By the next afternoon, we were expected to be in Gavalou, four hours away. That wouldn’t do at all.
Chris saved the day through heroic action. After dinner, he took a city bus back to the airport to meet the flight arriving from Munich around 11 pm.
Now, in European airports, the baggage claim is within the secured area. You can’t just stroll in there from the street like we do in the U.S. But Chris showed the officials our claim tickets and talked his way into the baggage claim, where collected the bags and returned with them after midnight. Clean clothes!!!!
We were ready to drive to Gavalou!