I'm Back

Hi All, well, it's been a whirlwind. I've been gone since August 23rd for Greece and got back on September 10th 1.5 hours later than expected. The purpose for going to Greece was for a Host-Microbes Interactions course that I attended on Spetses that was from September 1-9. We traveled the 23rd, arriving in Athens mid-day on the 24th with a 10 hour layover in Montreal, Quebec. We explored Quebec and slept on the overnight flight to Athens. On the return trip on September 10th, we had a 5 hour layover in Munich, Germany and took an hour subway ride into the city, walked around briefly, ate lunch at the Hofbräuhaus, then returned to the airport for our 8 hour flight back to Boston that was extended to about a 9.5 hour flight because of a rattle that was discovered to be an empty cargo bin in the belly of the plane. That flight was painful. It's a 7 hour time difference between Athens and Boston and boy have I been tired. Around 7pm, I'm ready to crash but I do hope that soon I will be able to adjust.

Traveling in Greece is interesting. The good news is that since the recent Olympic Games, the subway has been updated and there is a subway that connects the airport to the rest of the city. It's about a 45 minute ride but very cheap. It was 3 Euro's for a 24 hour pass which is much better than 50 Euro's for a taxi to the airport. We walked almost everywhere and had good luck finding most things. Traveling to the islands was all by high-speed ferries. The ferries are all enclosed with seating like an airplane but nobody sits in their assigned seats and you can walk around freely without problems. We liked it a lot. The rides were long, up to 5 hours from Santorini back to the main port near Athens called Pireaus. But overall, very efficient.



We had 3 vehicles that we rented in Greece. We were very glad that we rented vehicles, it gave us a lot more freedom to explore and, in the case of Santorini, it ended up being cheaper to rent the car for 4 days than to pay for the 3 taxi's we would have needed while we were there.

"Big Red"

"Little Yellow"

"Speed Racer"


More about our adventures in later posts... stay tuned!