Disembarkation

Before bed on the night before our disembarkation, we were told to set our clocks back an hour as we were crossing into another time zone. 

The instructions were that we had to be out of the cabins by 8 AM the next morning and off the boat by 9:15, so time was of the essence. 

I didn’t have the most restful sleep and keep waking and looking at my clock. 

At 6:30 Bryan was also up and had a premonition something wasn’t right.

He went out of the cabin and found the halls were fully alive with people rushing back-and-forth. We found Ryan, our cabin boy, and confirmed the time with him and he also said it was 6:30. 

I turned on my phone and once it connected, the time immediately switched to 7:30. Then we we’re both really alarmed! We had to be completely out of the cabin by 8:00 and we were supposed to have eaten breakfast by then.

While we were trying to figure out what was going on with the clocks, we were alarmed and rushing as fast as we could to finish getting packed and ready to get out of the room.

I called Joe and Alan and they were casually getting ready, because they also thought it was 6:30. I corrected them and they jumped into high gear.

For some reason, John and Larry already had the correct time.

To make a very long and confusing story short, we were not crossing into a new time zone overnight. Daylight savings time in Europe was ending that morning at 4 AM. 

We were told to change our cell phones back an hour the night before without clear explanation of why. Then when daylight savings time ended, it moved our phone clocks back an additional hour, threw us off and put us a full hour behind. 

We finished packing and ran to the breakfast buffet and met up with the rest of our group. We then found a place to sit and wait for a while until we had to leave the boat.

We sat there with an Asian group that wanted pictures so we took theirs and they took the final picture of us together on the boat.

Once we finally disembarked, we caught taxis to the apartment in Athens. We had to take two different taxis because we couldn’t all fit in the same one with our luggage.

Neither of the cars had visible meters and we failed to negotiate a price. There were hundreds of people leaving the boat and it looked like hundreds of taxis. We were all being rushed through, so we felt we had no other option. 

The first guy charged €50 for the trip and the second guy charged €40 for the same trip.  But we made it! Another taxi driver told us to always negotiate a price up front. 

We temporarily parked ourselves in a small local cafe near our Air BnB until it was available for us to drop off our luggage. By the time we were able to drop off our luggage, Joe was actually getting worse and had no energy to walk with us. He stayed at the apartment while the rest of us went to the buffet.

WAIT!!!

NO!! 

THERE WAS NO BUFFET!!!! 😮