Our final day in Naxos -- and the nightmare getting back to Athens

Our last day in Naxos began uneventfully.  Because no other users were going in that date, our VRBO host had felt able to given us an extended checkout time on our apartment, for a fairly modest upcharge that I didn’t mind.  Most of that time was spent packing, and giving the grandchildren the chance to nap before we left for our late afternoon flight back to Athens.  But intrepid tourist Paul I couldn’t bear to spend the day without ANY sightseeing, so I headed out alone to see an archeological site, the Mitropolos Site Museum.  Located across the square from the Naxos Cathedral, built in 1787,

I entered without any admission fee after going down a set of steps from the square.  The place was comparable to the excavations under the floor of the outside of the Acropolis Museum, but with free entry.  There was series of clear panels in an underground area in Mitropolis Square that ran above and beside an excavation of buildings in the ancient Mycenaean city that once flourished at the location; other levels of the excavation show how the site was used around 700 BC as well as into the Roman era in the final years for the that millennium.  Instead of the artifacts being housed separately, they were left where they were found in the site, because the roof over the site could be trusted to preserve them from the elements

There was an old burial site within the excavation as well

which was accompanied by several placards explaining aspects of Greek funeral rituals of the times, as reflected by materials found during the excavations

Then, it was back to our apartment, and off to the Naxos airport, transportation arranged by Zas. In fact, it was the same driver as for our tour of Naxos outside Chora.   If our experience flying Olympic Airways from Athens to Crete exposed the disorganization that this airline could offer, what we went through waiting to fly back to Crete from Naxos was ten times worse.  There was a waiting room fill of people, waiting for two separate flights, one on Sky Express and one on Olympic.  There were signs and no announcements about what was going on and why we were waiting, just an empty check in desk; behind it, there was a machine for checking luggage.  The wait was made a bit more bearable because there was an extended family of three sisters and their husbands, living in Detroit and Chicago, who had a few small children between them – so our grandchildren were entertained while we had to wait.  Even better, some of them were public school teachers in the Chicago and Detroit systems, and another was an emergency room physician. So there were common bonds for Sam and Nafisa to share with them.

Based on online reviews, I had decided to avoid Sky Express and make our trip on Olympic, even though the times for the former were more convenient.  Big mistake; Sky Express got off the ground relatively on time, but we had to wait for hours in a cramped waiting room for our flight to take off; we got a coupon for a few Euros to buy food or drink while we waited, but the offerings were pitiful.  After some hours, we went through security, and had to stand in line for a long time, waiting to be allowed to board our plane.  Then, off we went onto the tarmac, but there were two planes out there, both Olympic, both bound for Athens, and nobody to tell us which was our plane. Only when we were getting ready to ascend the mobile staircase for what turned out to be the wrong plane were we redirected to the first.  That wrong plane, though scheduled to take off hours after our flight, was allowed to depart first.  Only then would we board our plane and leave for Athens.  Our flight had maybe 20 empty seats, so we speculated that the airline might have put a higher priority on getting the full flight off closer to its schedule, letting our flight linger longer.

Only there was a problem for many of our fellow passengers – they were scheduled to connect to their flights home that same evening, and the delay of several hours meant that they were missing their connections.  It had been Nancy’s strong view that we should take an extra night in Athens, gibing us time to relax between flights as well as not having to worry about being on time on our flight out of Naxos.  She was so very right about that.

But that was not the end of the troubles.  After we arrived in Athens, and waited at the baggage carousel for our luggage, half of the passengers on the flight were missing their luggage.  After standing around the luggage carousel, It turned out that only half our the luggage had made it onto the plane, because there was too much luggage to fit in the hold – though nobody had bothered to tell us until we had been waiting for our luggage and some of us went to the luggage service to ask about it.  And remember those twenty empty seats? Luggage could perhaps have been strapped into those seats, although of course the airline would have had to explain what was going on to many already-angry passengers.

So, we all had to wait in an interminable line to fill out baggage claim forms, which the luggage service folks had to type out and then reprint for us, along with instructions about how to arrange for the delivery of our luggage the following day (or, perhaps, for those leaving the next day perhaps holding the luggage at the airport until the following day).  While we were waiting on that line, Sam and Nafisa left with the kids so that they could have some dinner and get to bed.  The driver who had been waiting for them charged a bunch extra for the extra wait time.  Nancy and I had to pay even more extra for that.  We got to our AirBnB at about 10:30 to 11, nearly six hours late.  So late that many of the restaurants were already closing (the kitchens were closing) as we walked along Kidathenion, the big tourist strip jammed with cafes and tavernas, looking for dinner.  We were lucky to find one place along Thespidos that would still take us.   For us, the result was that we had a last day in Athens with out a change our of our sweaty clothes, while waiting in our apartment for word from the airline about whether our luggage had arrived.  It made for something of a sour last day of our trip to Greece.

But I was determined not to let that last day be ruined.  Read about that in my next blog post.