Day 1; Finally arrived in Athens for the beginning of a great adventure.
May 6, 2019
Finally, landed in Athens fifteen minutes earlier than the ETA and that’s good because I took longer to ride my bike than expected and the road was difficult, not because of the gradient or the wind but because it is almost impossible to travel in a straight line of the airport of Athens to my destination, Hotel Acropolis Piraeus in Piraeus, except by freeway ! After an hour, which seemed much longer, I started to go round in circles in a residential area after having turned off at a crossroads where I would have had to chase a car. Following the advice of two Athenians, one of whom happened to be a cyclist, I took the train for part of the journey to avoid the worst. In fact, I was further away from my destination, but no longer at the crossroads of the major roads I was trying to avoid. With less than five kilometers to go, my GPS cell phone ran out of power, as did my body. Fortunately, the friendly owner of a café helped me out: an electrical outlet to recharge my cell phone, a nice fresh orange juice and some advice to point me in the right direction. In the end, I arrived at the Hotel Acropole around 3:00 pm, almost five hours after landing. I took a little nap (I hadn’t slept during the flight) and after a lot of walking, I found the perfect restaurant to enjoy a delicious lamb shank with a glass of red wine to round off my day in style. All in all, some 50 km on the bike, 11,850 steps and a full belly. I’m ready to discover Greece. Here’s a good part of the route I followed, in two parts.
And here are pictures of my first day in Athens as well as those of the next few days that I will describe in my next article.
