We’re Baaaaa-aaaaaack! Firing Things Back up for 10 Days in Greece!
We booked tickets to Greece in a fit of optimism last September when we heard all 330 million Americans would be vaccinated by April 2021 and things would be back to normal. Neither of us had ever been, and it seemed like a good choice for a 10-day adventure that combined culture and physical beauty.
As soon as we booked, we spent every day afterward wringing our hands, wondering if we should just cancel. Especially when things got ugly around the holidays and then again when it seemed like no one was going to get vaccinated ever. We joked that people didn’t ask, “So when do you leave for Greece?” but rather, “So when do you cancel your trip to Greece?”
We almost did cancel. About two months ago. But we held it together and decided to stay the course. I’m so glad we did. We’re all reading Greece-related books and have watched some movies (um, “Hercules,” and “Mamma Mia!”).
And best of all, we decided to fire back up the blog and IG to track it all, just like the old days. Feels so good.
Yesterday we left NYC. On the one hand, it felt easy. Teddy even remarked: “Do you think any other family could have *started* packing for a 10-day Greek vacation two hours before departure?” The packing cubes, the suitcases and backpacks — all of it was muscle memory. The absolute bare minimum amount of stuff required went into three carry-on bags, one each for me and Teddy, one for the kids to share. We all had backpacks.
We left the apartment around 4:25 pm for a 7:30 flight from JFK. When we got in the car, though, the driver looked at us like we were insane: You expect to make it for a 7:30 pm flight??
Oh god.
Indeed, traffic was horrific. One big parking lot all the way from our place to Queens. Our driver — a veteran NYC cabbie type who lived near the airport — performed every obnoxious move, from cruising the shoulder to speeding to the front of a jammed exit lane and wedging himself in. He seemed more anxious about missing our flight than we did and I’d say his maneuvers bought us a critical 30 minutes — just enough time to check in before the deadline. Or so we thought.
When he dumped us at Terminal 4 at 6 pm and we went sprinting in, the line to check in was 300 people long. For whatever reason, every international flight leaving JFK that night was departing at 7:30 pm — for Athens, Senegal, Saudi Arabia, you name it. And all of us were late because of traffic.
“Are we going to make our flight?” Willa and James kept asking. I was extremely skeptical, but at peace with our reality, inching my roller forward two inches at a time as foreign passengers with huge trolleys of suitcases and very different concepts of “queuing” barged ahead to the front of the line, messing everything up even more. Deep breaths. What could we do? I emailed our travel agents and let them know to be on standby with some alternative options if needed…
Indeed, our deadline to check in came and went, and still we had about 80 people ahead of us. “We’ll stand in this line until we hear otherwise,” we wrote them. When we got to a clerk, it was already 7:08 pm. The plane was scheduled to take off at 7:30. She told us the computer wouldn’t let her add us — that the gate had long closed down check-in.
Then, an attendant in a purple suit sauntered by our clerk and casually offered to call the gate for us. We saw our only flicker of hope and pounced. “We can carry on! We can sprint and be there in time! Just please, please call them and tell them to hold the door for us!!!!” The woman did, and amazingly, the gate people on the other end of the line agreed.
Cue explosive, frantic, awkward, flailing, sprinting Sullivan family comedy routine as we bolted off to security with our boarding passes in a fit of “Sorry, sorry, gotta flight to catch, scuse me, scuse me!!” We got stopped for a bottle of sunscreen at security and I yelled “Keep it!!” at the TSA guy before blasting off at a dead sprint for gate B26. I’d yanked the kids and gotten a head start while Teddy collected the unzipped bags; we passed another family that was jogging for some other 7:30 pm flight (Amsterdam?) and for some reason I yelled to the dad as I passed, “Race ya!”
About a minute later, I see Teddy out of the corner of my left eye, streaking past me Usain Bolt-style with high knees and two rollers, nearly taking out a toddler in his path. If anyone was going to make it to the gate in time, it was he. Willa was the only one able to keep up with him.
And make it we did. They were practically kicking the rubber doorstop up from the gate when we flopped at their feet, Willa in hysterical sobs, the rest of us about to be if we hadn’t made it.
Unbelievable. You’d think we’d never traveled before. And to think that just a few hours before, Teddy had said, “Let’s leave super early so we have no stress.” Ha!!
The afternoon had been a string of miracles. Of all the Uber drivers in NYC, we got the ONE who actually gave a rat’s ass about his riders AND knew Queens backstreets AND drove more aggressively than anyone I can ever remember riding with. Two, that that attendant in the purple suit happened to walk by just as our sorry group was learning the flight was closed, and decided to call on our behalf. We’d already witnessed two other people on our flight be dismissed and walk away dejectedly to the (long) “rebookings” line. Three, that we’d packed only carry-on sized bags, a habit from our trip. It was the only reason they let us go for it — they saw how light we were and figured we had a shot of making it if we sprinted.
Four, and this is my favorite, when we were the last four people to board and realized we had to split up (they’d long ago given up our seats), Willa and I headed to row 16 where I attempted to put my bag in the overhead bin. It was large and bulky and heavy and I was sweating and shaking and unable to make it fit. Two blonde women my age jumped up and started rearranging all the bags in the bins to make it work — turned out they were Southwest Airlines flight attendants headed on girls’ trip to Corfu. They were my heroes. I couldn’t have been more grateful.
And then we sat for a mostly uneventful 10-hour flight to Athens. I barely slept, but I wasn’t nervous, which is a huge accomplishment, considering I’d developed that inconvenient fear of flying on our trip. Willa writhed and wriggled in the seat next to me, keeping me up. The one time I fell into a deep sleep, she tapped me on the arm.
“Yes?”
“I have three pillows instead of two.”
I’m going to kill you.
Really though, more than anything, I can’t believe we made it. I can’t believe it was that hectic. What is wrong with us? I think the lesson is, anyone traveling internationally in this understaffed, overly cautious post-Covid era should get to the airport 3 hours in advance. I’ve always considered airport early-arrivers to be suckers, but might need to rethink that critique.
We have three nights in Athens, and we’re staying at an apartment in Plaka at the base of the Acropolis, which we can see from our living room. In some ways, this feels so familiar — new destinations, James in his O’s hat, same old suitcases — and in others, so different — we’re all in masks, the kids so much taller and more mature.
(By the way, the masks are especially brutal because as of last week, no one wears them in NYC anymore. Not at the hair salon, not at CVS, not at Whole Foods. It’s amazing. So to arrive in Athens and have to wear a mask while walking around even outside in the scorching summer sun feels like a giant step back.)
We grabbed lunch (Greek salad for grownups, veal souvlaki for meat-eating children) and wandered around Plaka completing a few missions: 1) find an adapter that Teddy forgot to pack 2) buy a cheap soccer ball we can use while here and 3) stock up on some groceries for the next few days. We needed this stuff, but they also served the purpose of keeping us conscious until 9 pm, our bedtime goal. Tomorrow: Touring.
Still can’t believe we freaking made that flight.
