Stuck

Well, we knew today might be tough, and it sure ended up unpleasant in the morning. We got up around 5am – blegh, already – and our bus was a little late, and then our flight to Athens was delayed. Fortunately, our flight from Athens to Madrid was also delayed, so we didn’t miss it…buuuuut it was an hour late, which means it landed just about as the plane connecting Madrid to Heathrow took off. Wonderful, Olympic Airlines. Every single flight we’ve had with them has been late. As Peter says, it’s a very Greek airline – they tell us not to worry about late flights, because all the rest of their flights are also delayed, and at least they have nice food right? I mean the lunch was really good for an airline – meats, cheeses, lettuce and a chicken salad thing for sandwich plus delicious croissants, fruit, Happy Cow cheese and some other things. We ate it all with suspicions that we would have to stay overnight in Madrid, in a country with not so stellar food. Of course it was early enough that this could not end up being the case, but that’s the stress we were feeling. At least we’d napped and been fed a little.

Ultimately, though, dread and stress were the right things to feel. We couldn’t get anyone in Athens to help us, despite entering security to talk to people at our gate, exiting security to talk to non-existent BA people (probably on a goddamn coffee break for the 45 min that we needed them), and re-entering security before the flight departed. I suspect it was because if we stayed on their home turf, Olympic would have to own up to their fault. Instead they shuttled us to Madrid where we were then thrown between Iberia (a subsidiary of BA) and BA and Iberia again, without any useful results. The Olympic office was also closed at Madrid – oh good. If we had a dime for every wrong thing or goosechase we’ve been on for these flights, we’d be pretty rich. When we checked last week when we first landed in Iraklion they said that they would be able to check our checked luggage through no problem, so we wouldn’t have to worry about picking it up in Madrid. When we checked today they said that was impossible. So not only did we not have time to make the flight, we had to wait at baggage as well. We should have just run to the terminal for last call and said bugger to the checked bag, all things considered. But we didn’t so…now we’re in a pickle.

So without anyone to help us – not Iberia, not a local BA rep, not Olympic, not even Lufthansa or US Air or Continental – we activated a pretty intense phone tree. This is the first time we’ve needed to use our phones abroad and I suppose it was worth it, although it will probably be very expensive come bill day. Anyhow, finally we got through to a BA rep over the phone and she took our info and upgraded to a flight out tomorrow. BA457 from MAD to LHR and BA069 from LHR to PHL, for a paltry 374 USD (!) each. Considering that a new ticket costs somewhere around 1000E, that’s a pretty good deal. Not as good as actually making our flight tonight but I guess not bad (aka the magic of the airlines – screwing you less than you thought seems like a fantastic deal!). Also the travel agency booth we were near was able to book us a hotel for only 58E/ night…woo! Free shuttle service and it’s a 4-star hotel – probably the first we’ve stayed at this summer! I guess they have some kind of lastminute deal with the hotels in the area so the prices are lower…awesome. Big, has AC and a terrace (although no free internet, which seems to be pretty standard for 4-star hotel, poo on them).

So at this point we had planned not to have any Euro left, so we had about 13.70E out. Didn’t really make sense to take any more out – especially since this was an $800 day already – so we set about trying to make do on it. The problem was that the hotel is in a pretty suburban area, as the airport isn’t exactly in the center of town, so there’s not much around. The guy at the front desk told us we could take a taxi to a supermarket... yeah we weren’t going to do that and add a 5E+ surcharge to our yogurt purchases. We haven’t taken a taxi yet, why start now! So we started to walk around and lo and behold, we found a little supermarket right around the block. What a dumbass (when asked later, he said “well that one isn’t very super.” Oh thanks…). Time for supermarket dinner #2! This time we got nice meats, cheeses, crackers, 1.75E wine, yogurt/apples for breakfast tomorrow, cookies and some magnum ice cream for about 11E. HaHA! That means we had about 2E left for the internet when we came back even. It ended up being a pretty fantastic dinner and we both got legitimately full and wine-happy (it tasted like cheap wine but hey, it was, and at least it was a rioja). Which meant we passed out for about 7 hours before we got online to make sure our plane reservations had changed…but that’s ok. We confirmed the change so we should be making it tomorrow (fingers crossed). Here’s to hoping. Gonna get a few more hours of sleep now.

Addendum – that’s what I was *going* to post, but the guy at the front desk decided to be a jerk and tell me it was impossible to use my own USB at the computer (the port was in plain sight in the front but admin protected for some reason). I tried to post a smaller version but their computers didn’t support Blogger sites. I don’t really understand the paranoia considering they were only running Internet Explorer and presumably have the resources to fund tech support considering their per-hour charges are horrendous. On top of that, on the way back to our room we saw a little lizard skitter up the walls. Four star hotel fail! At least the room is clean, I guess.