Day 13:
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Saying Goodbye to Athens.
Day 13 was really the last day of our tour (aside from breakfast at the hotel the next morning, this was the last day of activities for the group). The day started out very early (breakfast served at 6am) to allow time for our boat ride from Hydra to Piraeus. Meeting at Hotel Ippokampos, our group walked down to the harbor to catch our Hydrofoil boat. They Hydrofoil is a much larger ship than the ferry we took from Metohi to the island and we all had assigned seats indoors (although we still had to pile our luggage towards the front of the seating area). The boat moves pretty quickly, so even a 2 hour trip felt like it flew by (the ride was also the perfect time for a cat nap, which helped too!).
Once we arrived in Piraeus, we quickly boarded a bus (sadly, without Christos, who had to pick up another tour group after leaving us in Metohi) to take us into Athens and the National Archaeological Museum. Unfortunately, two of our tour members did not join us on the bus and headed for the hospital instead after a fall on the stairs that morning, but we wished them well and Dafni kept us informed of updates.
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At the National Archaeological Museum, we met with our final local guide, Evi who led us through many of the exhibits. While we were waiting for Evi, the group had a snack break to help sustain us for the museum tour since we'd had breakfast so early that day! At this point, a nagging back injury was roaring its ugly head and my feet were pretty sore, so I spent quite a bit of time in the museum hunting for a bench or free seat. Luckily, the Whisper radios Rick Steves groups use really help because you can wander off a bit or spend a little more time at an exhibit while still being able to hear the tour guide speaking right in your ear. Just make sure to bring comfortable ear buds or headsets (depending on your preference)!
Evi led us on an informative few hours through the museum's best artifacts, which chronicle ancient Greece's artistic and historical revolution through the ages. The kouroi (plural) statues, which are some of the earliest post-Mycenean ancient Greek artwork discovered were especially interesting because it is easy to track advances in art over time in these particular statues as they go from stiff block figures to ones that seem to bring stone to life with real movements. The statues are also called kore (feminine singular) and kouros (masculine singular), depending on who they depict.
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Evi explains these two kouroi statues dating back to c. 550 BC
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After our morning at the museum, we returned to Hotel Hera (from our first few days in Athens) for the last night of our tour. As mentioned earlier, the tour was fully booked with Rick Steves tours (one at the start of their Greece tour, one departing for Delphi, and one - us - returning for the end of their Greece tour). It was so fully booked that our two tour members who needed to remain behind after the hospital had to be accommodated elsewhere with Dafni's help. Our rooms were not ready yet, so we left our luggage in the breakfast room before many of us headed out for our COVID tests to return home (back in June 2022, the US was still requiring travelers to test negative prior to boarding a return flight). Dafni told us that all of her tours had had a 100% negative rate, and I'm happy to report that the same held true for our group as well and while some of us approached the pharmacy with anxiety, we all left feeling relieved. Then it was time for some lunch and last-minute touring or shopping before our final group dinner.
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Dafni went all-out for our last group dinner, with a rooftop view of the Acropolis at nightfall and several of us met up for evening drinks from the rooftop bar at Hotel Hera afterwards for some floodlit views of the Parthenon.
It's all Greek to me!
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