Day 0 / Friday August 19th / Departure
Welcome to the start of my day-by-day travelogue! This is for my recent 10-day cruise on the Regent Seven Seas Explorer through Greece and Turkey! Note that I am AT HOME now and am writing this from home :). Every day I'll post the next step of the journey. Feel free to ask me more details about what I did or saw!
My wonderful mother Ann took me along with her on this cruise. She had always wanted to see Istanbul. The cruise went from Athens, Greece to Istanbul, Turkey. My mom lives in Sarasota while I live in Massachusetts. I was thrilled to be spending time with her!
I quadruple-checked my packing list, which I kept as light as possible. I'd heard many news reports about travel nightmares over the past month. Apparently COVID-penned-up summer travel demand, paired with a very low level of travel employees, was causing luggage to be lost in droves. I wanted to pack as little as possible so if I lost the bag I only had to replace a few things. I only packed 4 days of clothes and planned to run laundry on the ship a few times, which was free. Note that this still meant 8 sets of clothes, because I packed tunic tops and pants for the long hot daily adventures and then dresses for evening meals.
My main suitcase was 35 pounds. I also brought a small carry-on for my laptop and headphones to keep with me. Often in the past I’d take, in addition, both a digital camera and a film camera. However, I wasn’t risking either with the luggage-getting-lost situation. My cellphone would do fine.
At about 1:30pm Bob and I drove in to Logan. We knew that traffic out of Boston would be fairly heavy, and Bob had a gig Friday evening, so we wanted to make sure we left him enough time to be prepared. The drive in was fairly smooth. Soon I was dropped off at the Iberian gate. Barely any passengers were wearing masks.
My flight was in two stages - Boston to Madrid, Spain and then Madrid to Athens, Greece.
My mother had kindly set us up with business class flights. Check-in was a breeze. The desk person checked both my passport and my COVID vaccine card. She let me know my ticket gave me access to the business lounge area.
There was a separate security line for business class. That went quickly. Fairly soon I was in the terminal area. There was a lounge sign to go for “Air France” and as I didn’t see any other lounge signs, I followed the Air France one. It took me to an elevator, which made me concerned – I like to be near the actual gate area in case of changes or announcements. Still, I went to the different floor.
Down an unmarked alley, and there was the lounge with a line. Out of the four groups ahead of me, two were turned away. They let me through. The lounge area had small tables with straight chairs and then a collection of softer chairs. Nearly every single chair was full. There was a small buffet with a few small sandwich options, a few trays with meatballs or pasta, and then an open bar. There were nut mixes.
A screaming baby. A dense crowd. No masks anywhere.
The lounge didn’t seem very ‘relaxing’ to me but apparently quite a number of people were trying to get in who weren’t really allowed to, maybe because of the free food and alcohol. It was all you could eat or drink.
I luckily found an open small table and had two small turkey-and-swiss rolls. I foolishly had a Diet Coke, when my plan had been to sleep on the flight. Finally the crowdedness, the screaming baby, and the sense of being away from my gate got to me and I headed back up.
The gate area was quite full, and I finally found a spot on a stool by a bench with a charger. I texted Bob to give him updates. The overhead announcements made clear we DID need masks for the flights and could buy them at the shops. Not too long later they began boarding prep.
Business class went on first.
Each passenger had a ‘pod’ in a seat with lumbar controls. The seat could recline fully. We each had a TV, headset, and controller. Normally when I fly I listen to soothing music on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. These headphones are so old they are still wired. Unfortunately, on my phone I somehow confused YouTube Music with YouTube Premium and in the lounge I'd activated YouTube Music. This meant, once I went into airplane mode, I didn’t have access to my ‘soothing music’ mixes. Ooops. You’d think by now I’d have moved all my iTunes music onto my actual phone, but I never did it when I switched phones and keep forgetting.
In business class, you’d think dinner would be a key part of this experience. However, by the time they got to me they were out of the salmon and chicken so the only option was cabbage. That seems an odd thing to feed people on a long flight, but it was tasty enough.
Then we all stretched out and they turned down the lights. I did sleep a bit, but I probably would have slept more if I’d not drunk that Diet Coke!
At last we landed in Madrid. It was now Saturday morning and the sun was just coming up.
Step count: 2071 Steps
Day 4 / our visit to Crete Greece. There are about 100 photos from today in this slideshow, along with two short videos. We walked around the town center and then had lovely meals on board the ship. Ask with any questions!
