October 1st-3rd, 2002 (Tuesday-Thursday)


This was a really long day. I left California on a flight to London's Heathrow airport at 18:45 California time. It's a 10 hour flight. Then I had a 10-hour layover. I had thought there was an earlier flight to Greece that I might be able to take on standby, but there wasn't. The Tube workers were on strike, so I couldn't leave the airport, even if I'd wanted to. Heathrow is basically a mall with doors that will take you to pretty much anywhere in the world -- Bangkok, Sydney, San Paulo, Rio de Janero, Kuwait, Male Colombo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, Nairobi, Athens, Tel Aviv, etc..

Then, I had a four hour flight to Athens, where I arrived at 4:15 in the morning! I caught a flight to Iraklio, Crete at 5 am.

Greek roads are exciting. Most of the whole country is mountains and almost all of the roads are two lanes -- one in each direction. Some of the roads have wide shoulders though. This makes it possible for one car to drive mostly in the shoulder while it's passed on the left by a car which can mostly stay on the right side of the road. My cab to Agia Pelagia, the little resort/conference-center town where I was meeting Machelle, passed other cars like this constantly.

Between flight times, layovers and timezone changes, it was Thursday morning by the time I got to Agia Pelagia. Machelle and I hung out on that day, wandering around Agia Pelagia, eating, and basically trying to keep me awake until it was late enough to be reasonable to go to sleep.


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