Alice and Magda caught the 4:30am shuttle and Steve and I went on the 5am shuttle because we had so much luggage. It was just gross to be up so early with so little sleep, my eyeballs were gritty! We checked in at the ticket counter no problem right up until the agent asks how many pieces of luggage we had. We have 9 pieces of checked luggage total with only 8 allowed between the 4 of us. The ticket agent says we have to pay for the extra piece of luggage. Alice has 2 pieces, Steve and I have 4 between us, so Magda is the culprit with 3 pieces. It’s all that dratted cheese!! We apparently can’t pay for the luggage at the ticket counter. Oh boy! It was 5:30am by this time and ... read more

A cookout was planned at Pappous and Yiayia's house in Mikrokastro for everyone to come say farewell to Steve, Alice and Magda. We’re not sure whose idea this was or how it ended up being here, but Xristos did at least volunteer to man the barbeque. Steve and I slept in a little and Magda went to Siatista with Xristos to buy paper goods, soda, beer and meats for the cookout. She bought 17 kilos (about 40lbs!) of meats!! Holy Crap!! Steve, Alice and I drove into Kozani to get the CDs, souvenirs, luggage locks (for the bus), tape and packing materials. First we went to the liquor store and bought (to bring back to the States) a bunch of different ouzos and tsipouro. Tsipouro is a strong distilled spirit containing about 45 percent alcohol by ... read more

Argh had to get up early to get on the road to Salonika , but we didn’t actually leave until around 11am I think. Steve couldn’t find his wallet when we went to check out and he went back to the room to search and found it buried in the sheets on our bed! Yikes, that would have sucked big time if he hadn’t noticed before we left. Stergios had said it was really difficult to find parking in Salonika and that the traffic was horrible, so we parked the cars at the first parking garage we saw. We took the bus to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, which didn’t take long maybe 10 minutes. We got to the museum around 12:40pm and found out they open at 1pm, not too bad and could have been ... read more

Amazingly, we woke up at 10:30am. Of course it could have been due to the people in the room above us making a ton of noise, it sounded like they were dragging the furniture around and their kids were crying and screaming so sleep was not happening. We had breakfast at the hotel and I had an ‘English’ Breakfast that consisted of bacon & eggs w/ bread, it was pretty good. On the breakfast specials list they also had a ‘Greek’ breakfast that consisted of cold coffee and 2 Marlboro cigarettes – I’m not sure if that was a just a joke or if you could actually get it, but pretty hilarious all the same! We decided to walk straight down to the beach today from the hotel and turned to the left. The ocean was ... read more

Since we were in Santorini; Steve has been talking about going to Chalkidiki to visit his cousin Stergios, who works at a restaurant in Pefkochori, a beach resort area. The original plan was to go straight to Chalkidiki from the airport in Salonika, which would have made perfect sense since the airport is actually on the peninsula of Chalkidiki . Chalkidiki is a peninsula that resembles a hand with three ‘fingers’. The ‘fingers’ are named Kassandra, Sithonia and Athos from bottom to top. Kassandra is the most developed and is where Steve’s cousin is for the summer and Athos is where Mt Athos and all the monasteries are (off limits to women and non Orthodox men). However when this was first brought up, Xristos decided that we should wait until the weekend, so he and his ... read more