Back in the USA

We dragged our host through most of Athens and saw as much as we could see in one day. The Acropolis was absolutely amazing, as was the Archaeological Museum and some of the other ancient sites around the city. Athens is truly a unique city, the architecture is quite depressing and graffiti covers most of it, mixed in with in with some of the most important sites of the ancient world, it creates quiet a dichotomy. We spent one night drinking cheap wine from a hill overlooking the acropolis and the rest of the city, and worked hard to dispel some rumors about the US to some Greek students (supposedly George Bush was trying to make all Americans get some sort of bar code tattoo to track us). We spent the better part of a day pushing our boxed up bikes in a commandeered shopping cart to our host's house which we thought was only 1.5 k from our campsite, turns out the address we had was right, but the city was wrong. 10 km later of pushing and we had our bikes safely stored. Athens is not a bike friendly city and we hardly saw any bikers there, thus so one really knew how we could get our bikes to the airport, roughly 30 k out of town. Every one's car is tiny as are the taxi's (which are notorious for horribly ripping off tourists), bikes are not allowed on public transport, and the metro has stopped running to the airport as well. Luckily out hosts aunt saved the day and showed up on time (a rarity in Greece, where being on time is considered being "English" as opposed to being late, "Greek") and expertly tied our two massive bike boxes to the roof of her sedan. No extra charges from the bikes and little hassle on the plane both times makes me want to always travel with a bike. We will get our pictures posted on here ASAP so stay tuned.