Departing Egypt

Leaving Cairo was bittersweet, we thoroughly enjoyed the people, and all of the wonderful places to see, but the traffic and constant noise was hard to take. Even on the 26^th floor of the hotel, the car horns were extremely loud.

We made arrangements to leave early on Monday morning since the traffic is so congested, our taxi driver spoke some English and he skillfully maneuvered through the bumper to bumper traffic on the way to the airport. Or route took us through the city and the last 2 km were on a sort of freeway, it took about an hour to make the 13 mile journey. As I mentioned earlier, the roads and streets are designed for a certain number of lanes which are ignored, so if there are three marked lanes the traffic will squeeze together to make 5 lanes, all bumper to bumper and within inches of each other, somehow the traffic flows with a lot of honking, drivers constantly honk as other drivers to let them know are too close or passing or tell them not to crowd in. Our driver came within a half inch of a collision, smiled and said, ‘see, no collision’. He was very nice and pointed out all the sights along the way, Mubarak’s compound including the military base to protect him, his private house, the Olympic facilities, Air Force base, etc. all the time whizzing along between, around, and last minute crossing to the opposite side of the road to make the exit. I guess if you live there you would get used to the traffic, for us tourists, it was no fun.

We bought a lot of souvenirs’ in Rhodes, Istanbul and Cairo, but this created a problem since the airlines are very strict about weight limits and the number of bags allowed as carry-on luggage. During our side trips we left our large suitcases in the storage facility at Athens airport, and then travelled with one backpack each, and a duffel; we checked the duffel and then just took our backpacks on the plane which worked very well. The problem was we bought so many souvenirs that we were over our weight limit to fly on Aegean to Mytillini. The airline allowed a total of 20 kilos or about 44 lbs for each of us, when we got back to Athens we redistributed some of the souvenirs to the suitcases which then increased the weight to about 23 kilos each, plus we had the duffel stuffed.

It is possible to increase the weight but the cost per kilo is 2 Euros, so with the extra weight and the duffel it would have been somewhat expensive. I decided to leave the duffel with Barb who was waiting away from the ticket counter, I then took both our bags and walked to the ticket counter, the counter was not busy and three agents were waiting, so I tried to determine which one would be the most sympathetic, I decided one young lady in particular might help since she smiled at me, so I explained we had bought too many souvenirs and our bags were overweight, she said not too worry they can be a little heavy with no problems and voila! no problem, she checked the bags without excess fees.

We then took the duffel and our backpacks through security where they took everything out of the duffel looking for a small nail file that I had forgotten to put in the checked baggage. I lost my longer file in Amsterdam; in the US the file is not a problem. Did I mention that Barb got her file through both Amsterdam and Athens? So they are dumping everything out and in the process find the insect repellent that I also forgot to take out, so that was gone and they finally found the file, determined it was 2 cm to long but apparently felt pity on me and let it go. As we left security, Barb reminded me she still had her longer file; can you imagine how tempting it was to turn her in at that point? But I licked my wounds, accepted the loss and we took off for the gate.

The flight to Mytillini was only 40 minutes in a Avro RJ100, this four engine RJ seems to be a bit of overkill but it is the smallest plane in the Aegean fleet. Olympic operates numerous DeHavilland Q400’s’ and larger equipment such as 737, A320, A330, and 747’s. We did notice several Olympic mothballed aircraft at the airport, everything from A330 to a 737-200 that said training on the side. Aegean and Olympic are trying to merge but the government so far has not allowed due to anti-competitiveness. Aegean is a good airline but lost a lot of money last year, we had five flights on Aegean and every one was a good experience.