We arrived at the Athens airport around midnight, so that's where I will pick up...
After a 6 hour boat ride, a 30 minute walk to the metro/buses, and the hour bus ride over to the airport, we were getting pretty tired... I guess I should start by telling you that we decided to just stay in the airport since we only had 9 hours from the time we arrived until check-in... Ok, so the athens airport is pretty much your typical airport, except it's extremely clean. I am not sure if they remodeled it for the 2004 olympics and have just done a great job of keeping it up or what, but it's really clean and really nice. The only problem with airports, however, is that they don't have beds. So, for the first 30 minutes or so we hunted for a spot to sleep. Finally we found a pace upstairs near the airport chapel away from all the noise, and decided that the cool tile floors would suffice for one night.
We all did different things...
Josh went to sleep and watched the bags. Blake used the free internet to get some stuff done. I couldn't sleep, so I made a hodgepodge of phone calls to my parents, my sister Emily (sorry Barrett, I didn't have your number on me), David, and Matt (my best friend from college). Around 3 o'clock when I finally got tired, I headed up to the sleeping spot we had picked out. I fell asleep in about 2 seconds, and the next thing I knew (about an hour later), airport staff was waking all of us up. In addition to us, there were at least 20 other people or so that were also told to "get up". So, it's 4 in the morning and we are still super tired, with 5 hours before check-in. Long story short, we ended up in 2 different restaurants and finally out in to the main airport terminal area... we slept awkwardly in all these places. I would say that I got about 1 hour of actual sleep. Josh and Blake fared a little better.
Finally... 9:10 am rolled around and we are able to check in. The whole process was pretty seamless until we got to Milan...
We arrived at the Milan Malpensa airport which is northwest of city center. Since Blake doesn't have Eurail, so he had to book a flight to our next destination, Barcelona. He booked on another airline, though, so he had to get over to another airport. Either way, all of us had to get to central station, so we made our way over to the train terminal at the airport. This is where we found out that the Italian rail system was on strike for the day... Are you kidding me??? Alright, so all we have to do is get back to central station. We grabbed a direct bus (5 Euro each) and headed that way, only to find out that all the trains out of the city were also on strike.
We couldn't find wireless internet, so we headed in to an overprices internet cafe. Here, we found out that to fly it would be super expensive. So, we just check email and headed back over across the street to the train station. Blake took off on a bus for his flight and Josh and I just stood in seperate ticket lines, hoping to get a good answer as to what we should do... After standing in 4 different lines and talking to a bunch of idiots, we were no further along than when we started. We kept getting pushed over to information, and those guys were the worst of all. I seriously wanted to reach through the glass and choke one of the dudes. Anyway, information told us to head outside because there was a bus headed for Barcelona as a replacement. Perfect right? Well, not if the guy tells you to go to one spot and the bus goes to another! So, we missed the bus (freaking information guy!) and the train was canceled...
...after another hour or so of asking around and reading our eurail timetable, we found out that we could connect in Bern, Switzerland the next day and then take a night train from Bern to Barcelona. So, with no other options, we found a somewhat affordable hotel near the train station, hit the internet cafe again to email Blake the updates, grabbed gelato for dinner, and crashed.
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