Fourth Day: To Greece!

We are happy to wake up at 4 AM, partly because we are heavily jetlagged, and because, after all this, we are finally going to Greece. Sweet deal! Anyway, we successfully take our jet into Athens, and then check out how to get to the isle of Mikonos, our first of three destinations in Greece.

Mikonos is known as the party island, and it is very well known for its large and intense collection of gay bars. Caroline had friends staying there at the same time, so we stayed at basically the same resort as them. It’s also known for its wide variety of gay bars and clubs.

We end up talking to a number of travel agents who book us the tickets for our island adventures. I had literally just traded my $180 for 102 Euros, and was happy to know that I could participate in group expenses, only to see all that money slip away to pay for the ferries. Ridiculous. We were going to have the convenience of taking two fast boats out of the three, which was a plus.

Getting to our boat of course required additional travel. Most ferries in the Greek islands come in and out of Pieraias, the main port. Ours, however, would be departing from Rafina, which was, we were happy to hear, a quaint port town with a beach that was actually closer. We spend about an hour waiting for the shuttle and then make our way down there.

Once there, we have a simply marvelous time at lunch and on the beach. We were finally getting our first taste of Greek sun and water, and it was great. Things were looking up. Our boat came, we boarded it, and had welcome uneveltful passage to Mikonos. I for the first time made the connection between how cool it was that I was reading the book that I am, a textbook on Classical philosophy, at the same time that I am actually here. It makes both experiences better.

After we got off the boat in Mikonos, we find the guy with the sign for our hotel/hostel and ride with him in his suburban. The drive was incredibly scary. There were winding ridge roads and people on scooters all around us, and our driver was sociopathically aggressive; par for the course in Greece it seems. Upon arriving at the hotel, the party nature of the island became more than apparent as bass from techno music poured out of the club not fifty yards from our room.

The first thing was did was go to the beach, and the moment we stepped on the sand we hit a brick wall of sound. The clubs line the beach on Mikonos, and each one is playing a different song, so that if you are actually on the beach all you hear is annoying beat interference and girls screaming. This was not what I needed. We had a couple drinks and then went to dinner. Someone stole my plate of food but the guy gave me another one.

At that point, my path diverged from the rest of my group. Basically, they all went clubbing, and I went to sleep. What a winner, huh?

Day 3: In Paris

Today begins exactly where the previous one left off, unpunctuated by sleep. We’re three hours late, and our bags (precisely: their bags; I did not check any) are missing, and there is nothing we can do about either of these realities. We decide to go to the hotel; there is a driver waiting for us, and he deftly wends his way through the capillaries of Paris to our destination hotel, where the Edwardses are waiting for us. We go have coffee, and the go to an awesome lunch on the parents, which is fantastic, and I instantly fall in love with our waitress. We then proceed to the Notre Dame and see that. Hannah Johnson is very excited about this. Lots of pictures and cigarette smoking proceed.

Hotel Jeu de Paume, where we were put up, is incredible. It seems that there are about ten rooms, and the rest of the hotel is devoted to being well-designed and open-feeling. The rooms were breathtaking, but the interior space of the hotel itself resembled a work of modern art. This was a boutique hotel, surrounded by restaurants, cafes, and foie gras specialty shops not a tenth of a mile from the Notre Dame itself. Incredible.

The rest of the day was spent in somewhat of a haze; we napped, got up for coffee, and went to the local mart and bought cheese and fruit. We took it back to the hotel and dined in their courtyard, wonderfully quaint and accompanied by a fine bottle of champagne that the Edwardses had left for us at the hotel bar for a gift. Tom and I then proceed to pass out, while the ladies go out and take in the Notre Dame at night. Our car will arrive at 4:00 AM, bound for Orly, to take the EasyJet to Athens.

Next Day: Accidental Intermediate Vacation Destination

The help roused us at 11:55, informing us that checkout was at 12:00. We ran around crazily for awhile and eventually found ourselves downstairs, checking out, with our flight to Paris departing at 5:50 PM. We had some time to kill and thought we would consider our recent questionable fortune as a surprise vacation to New York. So, what else does one do when you have all the equipment for being a huge tourist? go to the Empire State Builing! We set off down the street after getting our bearings. I plugged the address into my phone for directions, and it told us that it was about 1/10 of a mile away. So, off we go, except that the other, arguably more metropolitan and otherwise bearings-oriented members of my group swore that it was, in fact "this way".

To make a long story short, we end up at the Chrystler building. Magnificent, truly, but it sadly was without an observation deck or even admittance for those who do not have legitimate business in the building. We had walked through a large stretch of charming street vendors to get there, and we asked some locals about how to get to our destination building, but we ended up just taking the subway there, to the place marked neatly by the red dot on my phone's navigation program.

We do the building, and then go to the airport. Everything goes smoothly, and we get on a plane; one of the large, two-row affairs that have a 2-3-2 seating arrangement, and I am in the middle row between some guy and some woman.

Dr. Clive graduated with his doctoral degree in observation astronomy from Jodrell Observatory, University of Manchester in England, and, as I was to find out from the Internet later, had subsequently won numerous awards in astronomy and astrophysics from institutions worldwide, including the Mchael Penston prize. He was currently working as a millimeter-wave telescope researcher at Caltech, and it was on business that he was speaking at a variety of conferences in Paris, Munich, and at the newly opened facilities of the Large Hadron Supercollider on the Franco-Swiss border. He had been on our plane coming out of Los Angeles, and was sitting next to me.

I had at that point what was certainly the longest continuous conversation of my life. The plane took off two and a half hours late, at which point he was explaining to me about exposure subtraction of galactic contributions to the microwave band in the context of interferometry, a subject about which he happens to be the world's leading expert. We talked about hyperinflation, the Higgs boson, and basically everything. We talked for about seven of the nine hours of the flight, straight. He was depressed about the closing of the Crown City Brewery. He liked to make a little money off nine-ball now and again down at Jake's Billiards. He hated Lisa Randall and the popularization of modern science, even though it paid the bills. He smoked lots of weed. He was 32 and was a charming Brit. We talked about chicks, beer, music and theoretical physics. What a dude, right?

Anyway, we both retired to watch Even Almighty, and we soon landed in Paris, at 10:30 AM, three hours late, to conclude day 2. I wished Dr. Clive luck on his conferences, and after agreeing that the best course of action would be to further discuss matters over pool and a pint at Jake's, we bid farewell. We then found out our luggage was missing.

Day the First: Snafubar

We begin as we begin all things in life, with a trip to the Edwardses, where I stay overnight in anticipation of the flight the next day. Hannah arrives early in the morning, and her father drives us to the airport. All is uneventful in the beginning of the flight.

We were warned of questionable weather in JFK, our connecting airport. I read the entirety of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and half of The Classical Mind, the first in a series of five books on the history of philosophy. The ominous weather predictions turned out to be true, and this is where our path diverges from the expected.

Originally, we were going to connect with another American Airlines flight to Charles de Gaulle airport, with an hour and a half layover. The ground conditions forced us into a holding pattern, and the holding pattern forced us into a low-fuel situation. We had to land at Logan. Not the correct airport, though we did try to stay on the sunny side by envisioning terminal-located Legal Seafood Crabcakes and Chowder in our future. We were subsequently told that we would not be leaving the plane for the next couple hours.

On the ground, we got a bearing on the status of our connecting flight. Never before had I hoped that one of my flights was grossly delayed. I was happy to hear that it was, and it became a race to see if we could get there in time.

By the time we left Logan, we were over five hours late, but our plane had not yet departed. We landed at JFK, finally, and were waiting with baited breath to see if we could actually make our connection.

We were on the tarmac for two hours. Waiting to get to our gate. This is when the frustration set in; the climax of which was to see our very flight to Paris, the one we were supposed to be on, taxi to the runway before our very eyes and depart without us. This was compounded by the fact that the total time we spent on the plane had already been equivalent to a direct flight to LA to Paris: 12 hours.

Needless to say, much discussion of emergency plans ensued. After departing the plane, we made extra-special care to confirm that our bags would, yes they promise, be passed on to our flight which we had already booked from the tarmac for the next day. We sat down to find accomodations, which would, in fact, not be comped by AA because it was weather related, and "not [their] problem, " as one passing flight attendant so tactfully informed us.We get on the internet and start calling hotels, but they are almost all booked because of the inclement weather. We keep increasing the radius of our search, calling every hotel we can.

Thirty-five hotel calls later, we find one. The lady told me that, sure, they would hold the rooms for me, but, no, they did not need my name. My desire for "faith that this would work" out did battle with my logical side that was "confused as to how they could hold the rooms without a name", but in the end, I told the lady that we would be there in an hour or so.

I had just read in Slaughterhouse Five that "the surest way to hear God laugh is to broadcast your plans aloud." I only think of this in retrospect, but, needless to say, minutes later we found ourselves wading through pools of urine to make it to the end of the long, long queue for taxis. So much for an hour or so, and Welcome to New York City!

Fortunately, an angel appeared, in the form of a trashy old New Yorker in a suburban who accosted us in line and said he would get us there for sixty-five bucks. We did it. And we got there, and found a pizza place catering to drunk kids to boot. It was 4:30 AM. We all ate pizzas, and went to sleep.