On Board

 This will be a short post using my phone since, although shipboard WiFi is getting better, I'm having problems making my laptop play nice with my smartphone while they try to share my shipboard WiFi account. 

Yesterday, Sunday, 9/5, was a hectic day. Perhaps I should say it was an intermittently hectic day. Sort of like the old military days-- hurry up and wait. 

To begin the day, we had a pleasant surprise when the phone rang during breakfast. It was Dan, an old friend from the Ballard VFW. He popped down to the breakfast area and we chatted for a few minutes. He and his wife, Linda, are here to catch a different cruise. It was nice to see him. 

The first deadline of the day was to get our luggage to the lobby no later than 1030. We waited until 1020, hoping that the rush for the elevators would be over. That turned out to be true so we got our stuff down just in time and watched to make sure all bags made it into the truck. The bags would go through inspection and be waiting in our rooms when we arrived. 

Next deadline was an 1100 checkout. Made that, then found a quiet corner in the basement where we could sit comfortably and use our phones while waiting for the next hurdle. 

Our "Travel with Allen" group must number close to 200 people, so we were broken down into four subgroups and assigned busses for the two days we were in Athens. The luck of the draw gave iko and me bus D, so we were on the last bus to depart from the hotel at 1300.

Tired of waiting, we wandered around near the hotel. In a small park I found this interesting sculpture.

It's hard to tell from this angle but the last figure on the right leans out dramatically like a thumb. The inscription was Greek to me, but I took the sculpture to be a stylized right hand with assorted symbolic messages. 

We arrived at the port in piraeus a couple minutes after two, were given small plastic number cards (we were #16), and told we needed to wait in the bus for a few minutes while the crowd thinned. Twenty minutes later our group was guided into the waiting area, a largish tent, had our temperatures taken,  vaccine cards checked, and told to sit and wait. 

This procedure was administered by Holland America so they had cold bottles of water and cold damp towels to pass out to those in need. 

After waiting in the waiting tent for about 20 minutes our number was called and our group was led to the testing tent. Here we had our passports, vaccine cards and boarding passes checked, our mugshots taken, and told to wait in the line for testing. The nasal swab was taken and we went to the next area to once again wait for our individual numbers to be called. Twenty minutes later the magic number was called. This was the result of our test certifying that we were Covid free.

We were guided to the ship where I expected the usual preboarding ritual of PP, boarding pass, credit card checks. But, no, sanity prevailed, that ritual had been incorporated into the medical check/ testing and we were home free.

We were among the last to board so we had only a couple hours until we sailed. We backed from our berth and out of the harbor. Said goodbye to the helper tug, dropped off our pilot and headed out to the blue waters of the Mediterranean.