Day 1: Tuesday, 10 May 1983

Start: Chicago, Illinois, USA

End: Athens Center Hotel, Athens, Greece

Fortunately, the bike boxes looked intact when they appeared at Arrivals, along with us, on Tuesday. We experienced no problems with Customs. Nobody seemed to care what we brought with us. Rather than reassemble the bikes and ride into the city, we hired a small truck at a reasonable rate to haul us to the Athens Center Hotel, which somebody somewhere in Illinois recommended to us at some point, so we already have reservations for two nights.

Zonked on jet lag and hunger, we put both bikes back together in the hotel room and they seemed fine. Barely registering the city around us, we stumbled into the streets and had dinner beneath the Acropolis. Neither of us is in any condition to do anything, so we beelined back to the hotel to sleep off the exhaustion and get ready to explore Athens in the morning and deal with changing money, getting maps, and running errands.

Conditions

Distance: Thousands of miles by airliner 

Weather: Gorgeous but smoggy 

Road: n/a 

Traffic: n/a 

Mechanical: Safe and sound 

Physical: Jet-lagged