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Even after 5 ½ months on the road it is still amazing how surprised you can be by the ridiculously complicated and time consuming nature of traveling along what should be an obvious route. For example, our trip from Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, to Athens, the capital of Greece, covered 700km (about 430 miles) and took a good 12 hours. Our trip began with the 6am bus to Thessaloniki, the thrice-weekly service which is the only public transport running between the neighboring countries. Our first experience with famed Greek efficiency came at the Thessaloniki train station where there were two ticket windows open, no machines working and general chaos and confusion even though everyone in line seemed to be local and in theory should have known what they were doing. While the rest of the journey was fairly straight forward it almost made me miss National Rail…almost. 

We spent three days and four nights in Athens in a nice apartment a little out of tourist central. With the beautiful, sunny weather, we were able to relax and take in all of the ruins and mawbel cahlums we could handle. (You gotta get some!) 

The Parthenon

Temple of Zeus

Jess's best Corinthian column impression

Each day we visited the large central meat, fish, and vegetable market, a real highlight not only for the great lunches we were able to grab in the area but most enjoyably for the cheap and delicious fresh food we gathered up for dinner. We were even inspired to try cooking squid for the first time, and it turned out really well! I could also hear the voice of my friend Konstantinos ringing in my head each time I had a tomato. He once said to me: If you have never been to Greece, then you have never really had a tomato. I now understood why he would say that… they are huge, cheap, and out of this world meaty. Delish!

So much and so cheap!

Grilled sardine lunch

When in Greece... have olives!

One beautiful tomato

Self-taught squid preparation (thank goodness for the internet)

The final result

Neither us had been to Athens before, so we felt like we were checking off a traveler’s ‘must do’ by visiting the Parthenon and various other ruins. However, by the morning of our last full day as we were exploring Hadrian’s Library, we had the sense that maybe some ruins weren’t worth preserving – that this area would make a lovely park with a nice old arch in the middle. And with that, we decided to end our sightseeing. 

This arch is nice.  The rest... well... not so much.

We spent the rest of the afternoon at our apartment relaxing and packing up for our brief return to jolly old England. We celebrated the tossing out of the stinkiest pair of sandals ever, and we loaded up our bags for one final journey. We found ourselves glad to be finished, because it meant a return to normalcy (i.e. sleeping in one bed for an entire week!) was near. But we also sensed the nostalgia that always comes with an ending – a graduation, a house move, or, apparently, the end of an amazing journey.