Day 1-3 Ferry Trip
Saturday, May 14th, 2005
Here begins a day by day account of our trip to Greece:
Day 1: Luke’s 30th birthday! We spent my first day of “being old” (as Luci kindly puts it) riding from Milan to Verona. We had a beautiful day on the secondary road that pass by the southern bank of Garda Lake. In Verona, we walked around the city seeing the sights like Juliette’s Balcony and the Roman Arena. We went for dinner for my birthday and ate Filet and Veneto’s most revered contribution to viticulture; Amarone.
Day 2: Having enjoyed the secondary road to Verona so much, we decided to do the same to Venice where we were to catch the ferry to Greece. It was ugly. After about 2 hours in traffic and construction we realized we were going to miss our ferry. So we jumped on the highway and I tested the upper limits of what our bike was capable of. We made it to Venice in time to set up camp in a nice spot on deck where we could see San Marco as we passed
with the ferry. We had a beautiful Adriatic sunset from the deck of the ship before turning it.
Day 3: Woke up on the deck of the ship after a surprisingly sound night of sleep to an over-priced breakfast. It was very surprising to find that aside from the crew, a couple of Greek truckers, and two Italians most of the passengers were German. The ship made its scheduled stops at Corfu and Igoumenitsa before finally letting us off at Patra at about 7pm. We had the foresight to reserve a hotel before we left Italy. There was some sort of Greek superstar wedding and there was mad traffic, people honking their horns, and booked hotels and restaurants. Patras is the biggest city on the Peloponnesus. Nothing pretty to look at, but lively. We were planning on making a big loop and taking the midnight ferry back to Italy, so we left seeing the city sights until our return.
We got Ash dropped off at the airport and decided to hold onto the car for the remaining days before our flight out. To kill the time we drove up into Eugella ... 
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For just a moment I feel like I have to plug Virgin Blue and low cost airlines in general. For short hauls they can’t be beat. The way they work ... 
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We have done well to reserve in advance for everything. It makes travel seem a little less spontaneous and free but it saves a lot of hassle. Being summer here ... 
We got our last things mailed out from the Clothing Distribution Center (the USAP operations center in NZ) so now are packs are finally the ideal size for travel. In all I ... 
Luke