Blog by Tony (Wednesday 7 August, 2019)
Up early today at around 4:30am in preparation for our trip back to Greece.
We’d arranged for a ‘breakfast box’ to be delivered to our room at 5:30am….so finished packing our bags before it arrived.
We sat on the balcony one last time so that Kellie could have brekky with her pyramids before heading to reception to pay for any final room charges and to meet with our driver.
Check out took longer than expected as the final bill was confusing. They’d charged us for breakfast that should have been free…and they were going to charge us double for our trip to the airport…but when they realised that Kellie was Cleopatra in a previous life they stopped trying to rip us off!
With check-out done and dusted Kellie said one last goodbye to her pyramids and we were off for our hour long drive to the airport. The roads were fairly quiet but the driver said that as soon as 6:30am hit…the roads would be very busy with morning traffic. As we got closer to Cairo he wasn’t wrong…and due to an accident on the other side of the road…there was a huge line up of traffic (lucky it wasn’t on our side otherwise we may have struggled to catch our flight).
We arrived at the airport…and just as we removed our luggage from the car and was looking to see where to go, the Marriott representative who was so helpful in whisking us through customs on our arrival came out from nowhere and greeted us grabbing our suitcases saying that he could quickly help us check in before his guests arrived. This was a nice surprise and gesture as we had not booked or paid for this service.
Just like when we arrived…he was very quick in getting us scanned, checked in and through customs. Going through security was different to when we arrived as they physically frisked you. I had some little Egyptian fella frisk me and cop a feel of my goodies which Kellie said the look on my face was priceless!
Once through customs we said goodbye to our Marriott guide and purchased a few more souvenirs before heading to our gate. After waiting at our gate for 30+ minutes the lady said that our departure gate had moved from Gate 7 to Gate 1…so there was a mad dash to beat the crowd.
When going through security it was divided into male and female…due to all passengers having to be frisked…again. Although nothing beeped when I went through the scanner the security guard with smelly B O frisked me anyways. When I grabbed my bag the other security guy sitting down wanted to see in my bag as he pointed to something on his screen that he wanted me to remove from my carry-on luggage and show him. I couldn’t quite make out what it was…but after rummaging through my bag I found what he was wanting to see. It was Kellie’s hand held luggage scale…which looked nothing like the x-ray version that appeared on the security screen…and instead looked more like a cork screw. With that I was able to proceed ‘with’ Kellie’s luggage scales.
I met Kellie in the seating area where we waited to board our flight. Unlike boarding in Australia where the airline staff would check your ticket….as soon as the glass doors were open it was another mad dash to get to the plane and to find your seat.
We left on time and our 2hr flight back to Athens ‘flew’ by…. 🙂
There was a huge line up waiting to get passports checked by customs…and after 20+ minutes waiting we finally got through…and made our way to our luggage carousel to find our bags ready to grab 🙂
I’d booked a pick-up from the airport with the driver that dropped us off..Giannis (John) and confirmed by email whilst in Egypt…and found a new driver with Tony Kon on his sign. He seemed friendly enough and helped us with our luggage. He told us to wait whilst he went to get his car. A few minutes later he showed up and helped put our luggage in his boot.
Kellie wasn’t happy with his driving as he got up to 140km in some areas of the highway…and on average was doing around 120km/hr. We know this because we could see the speedo from the back seat. I noticed that he would have be holding the steering wheel at the bottom…most times with just one hand/his thumb.
We were glad to get to our hotel in one piece and it’s fair to say that we won’t be using this guy again.
After checking in we arrived at our room….which was small, old but clean.
The pillows were like rocks and the shower was so tiny…that after hearing Kellie say that it was the worst shower that she had ever had…..convinced me to not bother having one.
We went for a walk after checking in and searched for and finally found a place that sold Giros (Greek kebab). We had 1 x Chicken Giros and 2 x Lamb Souvlaki’s (meat on a skewer and then placed on pita bread). It was worth the wait to have our first Giros/Kebab and after washing it all down with a bottle of water we found a department store on the way back to our hotel where Kellie bought some sexy bras 🙂 She had to be rushed as she had less than 10mins before the shop closed at 4pm.
Across the road from our hotel at an intersection was a cafe…where we went and had a cold mocha. Sitting at the cafe enjoying our mocha we looked across the road and saw the hotel that we had booked for our last night’s stay in Greece…the ‘Theoxenia Hotel’. We had booked our stay with this nice hotel as it had 2 bedrooms for Kellie, myself and dad could stay in….but as dad was unfortunately unable to come on our holiday we went over to ask whether we could cancel our initial room booked for a smaller one…which they were unable to do as it was booked using Booking.com and payment had been made 🙁
We went back to our hotel and watched a documentary of Mahammad Ali (the only English speaking channel we could find) before setting our alarm for 4am and getting some sleep.