We were supposed to be in Athens by now…

Yeah, so the whole travel-through-eastern-Europe-to-get-to-Greece-for-a-couple-days-before-italy thing has been kind of a bust so far… Our PLAN was to take 2 night trains and one day train in between and get to Athens this morning, so we’d have at least 2 days to see it before taking the ferry across to Italy. However, the train was full (this has been the case pretty much EVERY time we’ve booked a train ticket, because they’re pretty last-minute… which has not been by our choice, but because you can’t book a ticket out of a given country until you’re actually at THAT country’s train station, apparently). So we had to do 2 day trains and a night train in between – 36 hours to arrive in Athens at 7pm today. However, it is now 9pm and we are still in Thessaloniki, which is a 5 ½-7hr train ride (depending on the speediness of your train) away from Athens. Ever since we’ve been in “eastern europe”, our trains have seemed to run a little late, but we had like 2 hour stopovers between each one, so we thought “no problem – we’ll totally make it!”… BUT, the night train that was supposed to run from 10:20pm from Beograd, Serbia to 1:08pm in Thessaloniki, Greece, ACTUALLY arrived at 5pm in Thessaloniki! so we had missed “our” train by a couple of hours. so we went to see if we could get on the next train (or ANY train tonight) to Athens… BUT, “there are no trains to Athens tonight – they are on strike”!! the next available train is tomorrow at noon, and we’d arrive at 6pm, and then have to get on the 7:30am train out of there to get to the coast to catch the ferry in time, so we’d basically just be spending the night!!! geez. So, now we are on a BUS out of Thessaloniki, which runs overnight with no reclining seats and arrives at 3am in Athens! we’ll have a whole day to “see the sights” and Jason’s family while we’re there! I just hope we sleep on the way and have somewhere to sleep when we get there (we planned to book a hotel online during the 3 hours we had from the time we bought our bus tickets and the time it left, but we wandered around Thessaloniki unsuccessfully, and have no reservations anywhere for when we arrive!!! it’s an adventure, right??? :)