Monemvasia to Oxford

Friday 29^th October 2010

Friday morning and we were both awake before the alarms went off at 07:00. We got up and had a final “Greekified” breakfast before doing the washing up, the final bit of packing and tidying the cottage.

A dark and stormy sky on Friday morning.

I had wanted to be away from the cottage by 08:30 and in fact we were on the road by about 08:15. Although the sky was very threatening at Limonas, as we cleared the mountains and descended towards Sikea it brightened up and so we had much better views of the scenery than we had had on the way down.

Our last view of Limonas.

 

We made great time and were back in Athens by about 12:30. Dropped the car off early, and therefore got refunded a day’s rental, which was an added bonus and then headed into the terminal. After checking at the check in desk we were told that we could not check in until 16:00 so we went off for something to eat (I finally managed to get a decent cup of coffee) and sit down for a while.

At about ten to four we went back to the check in area where the desks looked like they were just about to open, so we sat down and made sure that all the straps on our rucksacks were done up and tucked away. As we were doing this a party of British school children arrived and went straight into the queue for the check in, so we had to wait in line. Luckily the line moved quickly and we were able to check in, but for some reason we had to take our rucksacks to the large bag drop off desk (funny, they hadn’t been a problem on the way out). No worries, we dropped them off and wandered through the shops before going through passport control and then, at around 5pm, through security to the gate. We managed to get on the plane reasonably quickly and the plane took off on time (after the Captain “negotiated” with Greek air traffic control). The French air traffic control were on strike, so we went round France, over journey and came into Heathrow from the East, flying low enough over London to identify the Thames, Canary Wharf, Big Ben, the London eye before coming into land.

Easily through passport control, using the new “chipped” passports and the Iris security system (more information here, and here. I don’t think I registered for this, so I presume it took a picture of my Iris when I came through. ), collected our bags and went out to wait for the coach to Oxford. We had been booked on the 22:20 coach but we were early and managed to get on the 21:50. Got off the bus at Headington shops and walked home, arriving at about 23:00