Easter 2018 – Day 6 – First day in Athens

This was our first day caching in Athens, and we had a long list of caches we wanted to find, and places we wanted to visit. Beautiful weather all day, and not a single DNF.

Approximate time out caching/traveling: 13 hours
Total walking distance: 18,99 km / 11.8 mi (28 727 steps)
Flights taken: 0
Total cahes found: 19
Total DNF: 0
Cities visited: Athens
Famous places visited: Acropolis
Most memorable cache: GC6NPHH Marble at the Parthenon
Biggest surprise: How quickly we managed to walk around and find everything we had planned
Weather: Sunny
Temperature range: ~23°C / 73°F

The hill of ancient marble

The first on our plan today, was Acropolis. We wanted to avoid the crowd, and go as early as we could. Everything we read during our research, pointed towards this being a wise decision. And it turned out to be very correct. We got a bit late to bed yesterday, so we started a few minutes later than planned. But we still managed to avoid the crowd, and could walk up without having to wait in any lines.

There’s not much that says “Athens” like the Acropolis. So visiting Athens without visiting this place, was not an alternative. We made it to the top, and spent some time walking around, taking pictures and solving the earthcache up there. Heltinnen forgot her sunglasses, and quickly learnt that you need sunglasses in Athens…

Hop-on Hop-off

We had to skip one of the next caches on our list, since the area we though it was hidden in was closed. We had pre-booked tickets with Sights of Athens Hop-on Hop-off, so we headed towards the first stop. The bus eventually came, and we had planned to stay on board a couple stops. And then we had to stay one more! Since the driver didn’t pay any attention at all, and didn’t care to check if anyone was getting of… Not very fun to walk back from the next stop, but at least we found the cache!

We can’t say that it got very much better either, the audio guide was more music than actual guiding. And when they actually said something, it was even wrong! On top of that, the schedule was completely worthless, no root in reality at all. I guess you get what you pay for…

Time to hop-off

We took the bus a couple stops more, to find some caches, before we jumped off and spent the remainder of the day on our feet. This city appears to have around 4 million pharmacies, so we decided to try one of them. My feet was hurting quite a lot by now (after all the walking the previous days), so it was worth a try. Not only did they speak English very good, they also did their best to help us! I think we had a total of five of them running around finding things for us. Wow, that’s great service!

A bit further up the street, we started noticing loud noises. We got a bit too curious, and had to check it out. Turned out to be a protest march of some kind. No clue what they were protesting for/against. It was all Greek to us 😉 It was a bit strange to see the street empty of cars for so long, because we’ve seen cars and motorcycles everywhere up until now 😛 Even on the sidewalk…

Muggles everywhere

Caching in a big city can be time consuming, because you have to wait for muggles to leave. And we had to do that several times today. It helps to pretend to be tourists, taking pictures of everything from one of the countless orange trees to the streets we’re walking in.

We never tried tasting the oranges. But we did google it, and apparently they are very bitter (and polluted). When we got closer to Monastiraki, the muggles startet acting more and more intrusive. They wanted to sell us something, or pretend to give us something and then ask for money afterwards. It was rather annoying, specially when they did this very close to caches 😛

Can we even get through there?

After finding some caches in and around Monastiraki, the caches took us a different route back to the hotel. Narrow, white concrete passageways. We had to climb very steep hills to get up here, and that may be why this area lacks the huge amount of tourists that other areas have.

We did wonder if we would even get through he narrow passageways (see photos in the gallery at the bottom), but we did 😛

The view was worth it

Finding the way up the narrow and steep passageways wasn’t easy, but with the help from a couple signs, we eventually made it to the top. The view alone was worth it, and we also found the cache there, so win-win! 😀

Let’s try again

After a short stop at the hotel, we decided to give the cache we had to skip earlier a new try. And this time it went a lot better! We had gotten a hint from platoaddict on how to get there. She is the newest cachetur.no Ambassador (and the first US ambassador), so it was fun to find her name in the log 😀