They say it’s not about how you get there- let’s hope that’s true in this case! Our “day” of travel to Greece was lonnnng. Here’s how it went:

Wednesday morning, 8:30am in Palm Coast- tearful goodbye to the doggies (I was crying, not them. They were just excited that they were going to get to hang out with Lili and Remy!) load the car and hit the road. We got to dad and Melissa’s house at about 1. We’re glad that they live close to the Tampa airport so we could leave my car there and not have to pay for airport parking for 3 weeks. We had a few hours to kill at the Tampa airport because we gave ourselves more than PLENTY of time to get to our gate. We weren’t taking any risks.

Ok, now we’re on the plane to Frankfurt and ready for take off at 6pm. We settled into our Economy seats for the next 9 hours. This plane was hot, y’all. I kept thinking that it would start to cool down soon, but it never did. Somewhere around sleepless hour 4 or 5 I remember imagining going back in time and kicking my own ass for not splurging on the business class seats. I bet they were sleeping comfortably with all of their leg room and deep reclining seats. I mean, let’s be honest though, there really wasn’t an option for us (ha!) we are taking the budget friendly option every single time. We landed in Frankfurt at about 9am local time, which would have been 3am in Palm Coast. Let me tell you- I had never been more excited to get off a plane!

That excitement was short lived. WHY IS EVERYWHERE SO HOT? I mean, I know it’s summer, but come on, we’ve got the technology for airconditioning, can we not just have like a world-wide meeting and agree to all start using it? The Frankfurt airport was S T E A M Y. So we started walking to out next gate. We walked. And we walked. We kept walking. We went through customs and security and we walked some more. After walking a while longer, we finally got to our gate. Our layover was scheduled to be a little less than 6 hours, but by the time we got to the gate we had about 5 left. We did make time for a German hotdog and beer, but my main focus was to try to get some sleep. I found a bench and laid down with my eyes closed for a few hours.

When we finally boarded the plane to Thessaloniki, my head was fuzzy from exhaustion. Luckily, that flight was the most comfortable I had been in a long time. It was nice and cool, and I was able to get enough sleep to get that second wind going. We touched down in Thessaloniki at 6:39pm local time. Almost noon on Thursday in Palm Coast. We were so relieved that we were on schedule and the worst of our travel woes were tiredness and sweat.

That relief was short-lived… we took a van to the car rental company where we hit some snags with regulations that hadn’t been explained in our booking. The guy kept saying something about “if a ten year old rents a car then maybe all the cars will get stolen”. What? We decided we would figure out the car situation with a different company the next day and ended up getting a taxi to our hotel. If you ever need somewhere to stay near the Thessaloniki airport, I would definitely recommend Avalon Hotel. We made it there before the restaurant closed and were able to get our first good meal in a few days. We shared a Greek salad, some fried feta, and chicken truffle risotto. It was all amazing. We woke up pretty early Friday morning and were able to watch the sunrise over the mountains from our balcony. Kyle said that the breakfast there was the best breakfast he’s ever had at a hotel. We were so relaxed and finally felt like everything was falling in to place. We were able to get a new car booked, and had a really pleasant experience doing so. The woman there was so detailed and nice. We were officially set up with everything we needed to get going.