Last full day in Athens

I was serious when I said that we weren’t going anywhere today. 

Oscar and I sat on the balcony in the sunshine, did laundry and let John go see the Roman Forum and Hadrian’s Library on his own today.  Oscar did leave the house to get dinner with John from down the road, but I didn’t budge.  My feet and legs are feeling yesterday’s walk.  I can’t imagine how

John and Oscar made it around the stadium track, but I know now that the stroller can go.  We’re going to mail some things home tomorrow that we’ve bought on the trip and don’t want to carry around for the rest of the trip.  We’ll see if that’s cheaper than checking a bag these days.  The last day in

 Athens we enjoy breakfast on our balcony, get the last load of laundry done to dry before packing up again and walk around Athens one last time.  We go past Little Kook to see if we get to see the next theme and they have started taking down all the Christmas

 stuff, but say it will be a couple more days before the new stuff is in, darn.  We find out that it’s only going to cost $25 to mail our box of stuff home.  Sweet.  Then we of course find more things to buy.  Oh well, it will go in the next box of stuff to mail home.  We wander through the market and have to stop

every 20 minutes for Oscar to find a bathroom because he drank an entire juice box (which are larger here) with no food to go with it.  Good job parents.  But in this way, we find out that restaurants are more than willing here to let your five year old use their

bathroom without us having to sit down and order anything. That’s nice and unexpected.  We sit to have some snacks eventually and soak up the sun, there’s a cold front coming tomorrow and by the time we get to Istanbul, temps are supposed to be close to freezing.  We talk about how good Athens has been to us.  Even one of the waiters that lets Oscar use his bathroom mentions how Athens must feel like “paradise”

  when you’re from Michigan and on vacation, but states that it’s not good to live in.  I mention to John how we are going to miss these views, this weather and we’ll come back some winter and expect the same and get rain….We have another turn around the Acropolis and head back to the

homestead.  Which has really become home in a lot of ways over 12 days.  We now have our favorite bakery down the street, I walk out at dusk to pick up to go souvlaki from our favorite place and walk back without any fears about the streets.  Oscar’s in a horrible mood for some reason and when he’s

trying to go to sleep he finally blurts out that he doesn’t want to leave.   He states that he is going to miss the “sun”, he misses home and will miss Athens.  I guess all we’ve done by talk about how great it’s been so far is make him realize that things are changing again.  And we’ve scared the hell out of him with Turkey.  Don’t drink the water, don’t even brush your teeth with it and seriously keep a low profile.  We had a travel warning the other day for Americans in Turkey and this is the first one that is somewhere we’re going soon.  All of our others we’ve been able to ignore because it’s so far away, but not now.