A stop in London

Our airport does not have a direct flight to Athens.  Only a handful of U.S. cities do, most being central hubs for the major airlines.  However, Austin does fly direct to London; the flight that we have taken on several other adventures found in these pages, in fact.  Jen and I decided early on that it would be fun to stop over for a couple of days in London before moving on to Athens.  This would break the trip up into two parts, allow us to get over our jet lag early, and of course enable us to visit some favorite places in the city.

I booked the flights and a hotel across the street from the British Museum called "The Montegue on the Gardens", named for the aforementioned street.  This tickled Jen tremendously, as Sherlock Holmes had rooms on Montegue Street when Watson first meets him in A Study in Scarlet.  Have I mentioned how much I love this woman?

The flight itself was uneventful.  I had mistakenly booked it on the wrong day and spent a small fortune correcting this at the last minute.  We also lost our TSA Pre check status on the rebooked tickets, and they were in the economy section, which is not at all comfy on a long flight.  We nevertheless made it, though exhausted by lack of sleep and cramped accommodations.  This would cause us to curtail activities in London while we (mostly I) recuperated.

The hotel was lovely.  I really enjoy small, eclectic hotels with personality, and this one did not disappoint.  I would very much like to book there again for a longer stay at some point.

Forgive this last photo;  I was having difficulty with my camera.  I would only discover at the end of our vacation that the ISO setting had somehow been changed to a very high value (I normally leave it on automatic to let the camera automadjuat it to the stop I select).  So there will be a few shots like this here and there.  I've left them in when I hadn't made other compensatory shots with a better stop, as I figured something was better than nothing.  I've cleaned them up as best I can but sometimes there just isn't enough contrast, as in this case.

Greece and the Yellow Rectangle

I grew up an avid reader of National Geographic magazine.  I spent hours poring through its photography and prose capturing beautiful landscapes, strange and exotic animals, and people so very different than myself.  I've no doubt that this viewport into a world so much more vast and complex than my own little sliver had a role in my lifelong love of travel.

It was National Geographic's Expeditions offering that rekindled my desire to travel to Egypt, and it is with them that we have tried several times to do so.  Through no fault of theirs or ours, those plans have fallen through; this latest due to rising conflict in the region and a warning by the State Department not to travel there.

Jen and I pivoted, initially to Italy, to a trip mostly by train from Venice to the Sicilian coast.  However, it wasn't possible to move our deposit from the Egypt tour to that one (something to do with the different types of trips not being under the same financial roof), and Greece was.  So, Greece.

Makes it sound like a compromise, but it was always near the top of both Jen's and my list of destinations.  An easy decision.

The trip is scheduled for the end of August to mid-September, and will take us from Athens down into the Pelloponaise, then up into Thessaly, before ending where we started.  We'll visit Corinth, Mycenae, Olympia, Delphi, and Meteora, as well as the vacation town of Nafplia.  So many sites, so much history.  It's the trip of a lifetime, Reader, whether you've read your Edith Hamilton or not.