The Mrs. Guru and I are en route on our Greek adventure – we’re currently in a Lufthansa lounge at the Athens airport, waiting for our flight to Santorini. I’ll be posting a full report on the whole trip after we get back, but wanted to post a quick update. As you may have read, we left on Friday, flying up to Toronto (through Chicago), then from Toronto to Istanbul on Air Canada. I had never actually been to Canada before, so since we had about a 4 1/2 hour layover, we hopped on a bus and headed into the city to have lunch. Everything went smoothly with that plan, and we ate at a delicious Thai restaurant about 20 minutes away from the airport.
After lunch, we headed back to the airport and made our way to the Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, which was spacious, and comfortable. We relaxed in the lounge with a drink for about an hour before heading to the gate before boarding:
The flight was originally scheduled to depart at 4:25 pm and arrive at 9:25 am on Saturday morning. We boarded the flight on time, around 3:45, and got settled into our spacious suites. Unfortunately, around 4:15, when boarding had finished, some heavy thunderstorms were rolling into Toronto, which caused the airport to temporarily suspend all work on the tarmac, so all the ramp workers loading the plane had to seek shelter inside the terminal.
The thunderstorms stuck around for about 90 minutes, although we were nice and comfortable during the delay. And in all honesty, A 4:25 pm departure is a bit on the early side for an overnight flight, since it’s tough to force your body to sleep that early in the evening (even after dinner is finished about 2 hours into the flight). By the time the storms had passed, all flights at the airport were obviously pretty backed up, so it took about 45 more minutes before we took off, close to 7:00 pm. So the plus side was, after dinner it was easier to sleep, but the downside was that we lost 2 hours of our “long layover” in Istanbul. In the end, it worked out ok; we still had plenty of time to see everything we wanted to in Istanbul.
My original plan was to visit the newly-refurbished, world-class Turkish Airlines lounge in Istanbul after we landed to grab a shower before heading into the city. Unfortunately, the Istanbul transit procedures had other plans for us, with one minor hiccup after another. In short, we weren’t able to get to the lounge, but we did get to head into the city for some sightseeing.
In a few words, Istanbul was intriguing, cultural, hot, and stinky (it’s certainly different experiencing other cultures that have different views on deodorant than we do!). We successfully haggled our way through several deals, including a gorgeous Iznik-style plate at the Grand Bazaar:
We enjoyed our visit, but obviously in early August, the weather in this area is pretty hot and humid. Eventually, after hitting all the main sites, we made our way back to the airport, where we finally took some much-needed showers.
The Turkish lounge surely didn’t disappoint, and before we knew it, we were off to Athens. We made it to Athens shortly after midnight on Saturday night, and spent the past 2 days exploring the city, which was even hotter than Istanbul, but we had a great time seeing all the historic landmarks.
We’ll be in Santorini until late Thursday night, when we start to make our way home. We have a stop in Milan (another “long layover”) to see some family, who are currently touring around Italy, and eventually make it home on Saturday afternoon.
Cheers for now!