Adriatic Trip Day 9: Rome to Athens

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Our morning started extremely early because we had a 9:30 flight to Athens, and it would take a little while to get to the airport. Tauck provided a transfer to the airport as part of our tour, and we assumed that we would eat breakfast at the airport or on the flight to Athens. However, when we checked out, bags with breakfast items were waiting for us at the hotel desk. This was very generous to the point where we weren’t sure what to do with all the food!

A car came to pick us up as planned. Since it is a weekday, we had to deal with the expected commute traffic, although it was somewhat anti-commute from the city center to the airport.

With arrival at the airport, the Tauck “A Week in…Venice, Florence, and Rome” tour was complete, and the second part of our trip, the cruise, was about to begin. The Tauck tour was a great introduction to Italy for Kenna and a re-introduction for me, and was as close to perfect as one can imagine. Our tour director, Alexa, played a significant role in that.

---

After checking in at the Aegean Airlines desk in Rome, we proceeded through security. As frequent fliers, we have become accustomed to using airport lounges. We did get the use of an airport lounge, but it was somewhat crowded and small, though we didn’t have a long wait for our flight.

The flight itself was uneventful except for the scenery visible through the window. I had checked the options for getting to the city from the airport upon arrival in Athens, and my experience has been that trains are faster and more convenient than buses, so we decided to take the train (Athens subway extension) even though it is somewhat more expensive. This was not a great decision. Even at the airport, we had to lug our bags up flights of stairs to the train platform and figure out the protocol to get a ticket. Once inside the paid area, there were more stairs. We got on a train quickly, but as we rode into Athens, we picked up more and more passengers until the train was overcrowded toward the end of our trip. We made it off, but faced many more stairs getting to street level. Our friends Dave and Jan, who are joining us on this portion of the tour, arrived a couple of hours after us, so I quickly texted Dave to tell him to take the bus instead.

We checked into our hotel, the Athens Capital Hotel, again a 5-star luxury hotel. We had some free time, so we wandered around the area a bit. Our hotel is exactly in the center of Athens, and across the street from the parliament building, where we were able to see the hourly changing of the guards.

Mid-trip is the optimal time to do laundry, and Kenna had done some research into laundries in Athens that we might take our dirty clothes to. She found Athens Laundry about a 15-minute walk from our hotel. Our walk there gave us exposure to some different parts of Athens. Close to the laundry, the storefronts were heavily graffiti-decorated, but artistically so. The clerk at the laundry spoke perfect English and promised our laundry would be ready in the early evening, but we agreed to pick it up the next morning instead.

During the afternoon, we visited the hotel lobby to find the representative from Lindblad/National Geographic setting up a table to greet guests. We had booked an optional pre-cruise tour of Athens and checked in for that. Our first meeting as a group would be for lunch the next day.

Dave and Jan had made reservations for the four of us at Soil, a two-Michelin-star restaurant, a moderate walk from our hotel. They had made arrangements to meet someone else just before our dinner reservation, so we met them at the restaurant. As expected, our dinner at Soil consisted of a tasting menu featuring many small courses, laboriously prepared and beautifully presented. This was a “very special occasion” sort of dinner. We walked back to the hotel with Dave and Jan well-satisfied from our delicious meal.

---

This article is part of a series about our recent trip to Italy, Greece, Albania, and Croatia. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.