7:44 AM EST, Thursday, May 05, 2005. 14:45 Athens time

So it’s been a long journey, but shortly I’ll be catching the last plane to Mitiline. I’ve slept a little at this 4 hour layover, mostly because of a large beer I had with lunch. I feel very jet lagged right now. I guess it’s because I’d normally just now be rolling into work, and the reality is that I haven’t slept all that much. I think I got about 3 hours on the first plane, if that. Then the ½ hour or so here at the Athens airport. So yeah, my brain is a little foggy right now.

I am ready to be done hauling all this crap around and just settle into the hotel. It should be a nice hotel, so I’m going to appreciate that. I wish I had packed lighter, as I always do. But for some reason I thought that a week trip would generate so many snapshots that I’d need to take along this laptop to store them all. So the laptop came along.
- posted by freestyle @ 2:45 PM

 
Wednesday, May 04, 2005. 4:37 PM

I’m sitting in JFK airport in New York right now, waiting for my flight on Olympic Airlines to Greece to begin boarding. I’m going to a wedding, so I’ve been lugging around a cheap plastic garment bag containing a suit. I already finished the single magazine I brought along, “Automotive Engineering”, and as thrilling as that is for me, I still felt compelled to pick up a novel to read. I ended up getting “The Princes of Ireland” by Edward Rutherfurd, which is a kind of historical fiction account of the history of Ireland from antiquity to the present, I think. At 776 pages long, I expect this book will be a travelling companion of mine on many trips in the future as well. Or, if it’s really good, I might read the whole thing. I haven’t read a whole fiction book in over a year.

So that’s the mundane detail for now. The adventure is just beginning. Moving backwards from now chronologically, I flew here on a little puddle jumper airplane from Detroit. I had some fun on the way to the airport in the form of a flat tire. I couldn’t believe that I actually got a flat tire on the very day I needed to catch a flight. Fortunately, I’ve traveled enough to despise hurriedly driving to airports, so I left plenty early and other than 15 wasted minutes, I had no major additional stress because of the mishap. I drove over a strap of metal that was like a giant staple. My Jeep was oscillating back and forth in a strange way, so I pulled over to check. It looked a little flat, and sure enough, I heard the telltale hiss of a leak. I’m pretty amazingly sensitive to how my cars drive, I guess, because it hadn’t even come close to getting completely flat yet. But it was on it’s way – about half flat. Anyway, after some cursing and idle threats to hunt down the Jeep engineers responsible for the tire changing tools and rhetorical questions about what cheap low-wage 3rd world nation produced them and how they were going to get an earful from me, I was able to successfully exchange the wheel and get back on my way.

I saved a little time by loaning out my Jeep for a week to my roommate Darren, who hopefully won’t crash it or smoke in it. But at least I didn’t need additional time hunting for a parking spot. I’m actually thankful that he’s able to use it.

So anyway, I’ve been really stressed lately because I bought a duplex last week. It came with one almost-deadbeat tenant, so I’m in the process of giving him the boot. But he still has rights, and I won’t get to move into the downstairs flat until mid July. So that’s one source of stress, and the other is work. Work is very consuming right now, and it’s mostly because the project I’m working on is understaffed. We’re eventually going to be a department of 20, and right now there’s only 2 of us. So there’s a lot of pressure and here I am, going on vacation. Oh well, they’ll get by. I just need to relax. A lot.

Right now I’m wishing that I was travelling with at least one of my friends. Travelling alone was very fun for me once, but after having done it so much both with and without friends, I’ve decided it’s better to go with someone. You can talk casually about random stuff, and when you want to be social you don’t have to strike up conversations with strangers. Oh well, I’ll be meeting friends in Greece at the wedding, and will at least have a few days to hang out with them. I’m looking forward to it.
- posted by freestyle @ 4:37 PM