Missing your nine hour flight is not a good way to start your vacation. Our flight from New York to Cleveland was delayed due to “paper work”. I’m still not sure exactly what that means. Mechanical issues or weather issues I can understand but “paper work”, just what does that mean? When we landed in JFK we were at the check in desk about 45 minutes prior to departure and we were told that check in closed 15 minutes earlier. I’ve never missed a flight in my life and I was not happy. 

We were able to get on the next flight leaving the same time the following day.  Our plans for Thursday night were altered. Instead of flying to Athens we were staying in NYC. We had planned to spend Friday night and Saturday during the day in Athens. Since we were now not going to get to Athens until Saturday morning we would not be using our hotel on Friday night.

The hotel in Athens was booked through hotwire. I knew hotwire has a policy about no refunds and no exchanges but I decided to call them anyway and tell them my issue. Hotwire was either going to make me cry harder or make me extremely happy. To my surprise they happily canceled our reservation in Athens and booked us a hotel in New York City. I wanted to hug the customer service rep over the phone.

NYC isn’t the worst place to be stuck for a night. We made the best of our stay and took the subway downtown and had a good dinner at Heartland Brewery. 

Our Athens stay was cut way short. Instead of two days we had about five hours. The goal was to see and do as much as we could in the amount of time we had. The plane to the island Mytilene, where we were spending the rest of the week was leaving that same afternoon.

Athens was amazing. It’s so unfortunate that we didn’t have more time there. There are so many things to see. The city was much different than what I was expecting. I really don’t know how to describe it. It’s modernized but has so much history behind it.

Our stay on the island of Mytilene (Lesvos) was very nice. Basically everyone on the island spoke English. Everything that was written in Greek was always also written in English.  We had no issues with communications. The food was great! I don’t eat meat but they have vegetarian/feta Gyros that were awesome!  The beaches were not quite what I was expecting. They were more rocky than sandy and the water was cold. We saw castles, rented a scooter, hung out in a hot spring bath, saw beautiful sunsets, shopped in Mytilene, saw Turkey, ate great desserts, drank lots of wine, climbed mountains and relaxed.

Our flight home was somewhat sentimental. Until departure we had no idea that it was the very last flight ever from Athens to JFK for Olympic Airlines. They were bought by another carrier. The pilot thanked his crew for all their years of work.

More photos.