Trip to Patras (4/4)
Day #4 (Monday)
With as little as 2 hours of sleep, we grabbed a breakfast, which actually was surprisingly good. I had something with banana, bread and sugar. At first, it did not look that tasteful but I decided to give it a try anyway and liked it so much that I even ended up taking a second one. We, again, did not want to try out luck and ordered a taxi which drove us to the airport. We arrived quite early, but well, better than too late for obvious reasons. Upon arriving at the airport, we decided to just go to the gates as soon as possible. Somehow, both of us were picked for a security check. Fun!
The guy in front of us also was picked out. Upon going through some detection device, an alarm went off for him (and it did too for Dennis and me). Amazing, just what we were waiting for. They took some weird thing and put it on my shoes, hands, chest and then analyzed it.. and determined that nothing was found (same for Dennis and the other, unknown, guy) and we could continue. Still, something that makes you think "What if.." "Let's hope nothing bad.." etc. We still had quite some time to kill, after getting some much necessary supplies, we decided to play the "Athens airport open barrage tournnament", again, I won this prestigious title 3 to 2 with blue winning all 5 games.
I think I somewhat jinxed some bad luck upon us. I jokingly said I expected at least one hour delay as we would be traveling with Transavia (traNSavia) which contains "NS" which means Dutch Railways.. we ended up having, indeed, some delay. I think it totaled to 1 hour 30 in the end because of bad weather at Schiphol. At first it was announced that the flight would be delayed for one hour. 15 minutes after this announcement, some thing must have changed as suddenly the boarding started. We boarded the plane and found out that the plane was not allowed to take off (due to the bad weather at Schiphol). The crew informed us that they would be requesting special permission and that they would be reporting back within 5 minutes. The 5 minutes were not met, but nonetheless, the special permission was granted so we would be taking off in +- 10 minutes. The flight itself was smooth as it should be. We were both quite tired so we mostly tried to rest a little, I actually wrote some stuff on my phone (mostly pointers for this story) so I would not forget them later, but besides that, I tried to rest which was not very succesful.
Upon arriving at Schiphol we had a passport check and that was it. We were officially back in the Netherlands. We thanked each other for the pleasant journey and parted ways. I went to the train station where my expectations were fully met; delays. After arriving home I found out something that I did not really like, due to baggage space, I had given Marshal Lopix to Dennis (in exchange I had gotten him one too) and we had forgotten that he was carrying my Marshal Lopix. Upon finding out I jokingly said to Dennis "I hope you'll take care of him properly" about 30 minutes later he sent me a picture of a pizzabox with Marshal Lopix to ensure he was being taken care of just fine. I did also notice some salad, I'm not sure whether Marshal Lopix liked that or not.
Special thanks to:
(1) John Vandoros: Game and fun pics
(2) Pasxalis Tzenos: Close game and showing interest in my Stratego graveyard management method
(3) George Petroulakis: Game and the terrace drinks
(4) Charlie Palley: Game, somewhat of a traveling partner and of course representing clowns
(5) Dennis Baas: Traveling partner, two second places in the prestigious barrage tournaments and currently taking care of Marshal Lopix
(6) Anastasios Koukas: Short chat
(7) Angel Baron (and his parents): Game and settling a forum dispute in a basic manner
(8) Georgios Trypanagnostopoulos: Special invitation and some interesting Stratego talks.
(9) Dimitrios Bougatsas: Lift and good talks
(10) Spyros Vandoros: Game and interesting talks
(11) Gregory Adamakis: Game, talks and being our driver and ensuring we had a good lunch
(12) Ioannis Fytilakos: Talks, being the owner of the selfie stick and being a good guide in informing us about mountains, nature area's, history etc
(13) Georgios Papalexopoulos: My first game in Greece ever and a good chat about the game afterwards
(14) Nikolaos Mandalos: Very pleasant chats and accepting my challenge to play a game online
(15) Marilina Verra: Very pleasant chats too and revealing once more that Stratego players are very diverse in their other activities
Ioannis's Selfie stick: goes without saying.
And many others..
To summarize, it has been a great trip and experience. I'm definitely planning on returning some time.. probably soon 😊. While playing Stratego online and in national/local tournaments is a lot of fun too, meeting people you will see, maybe, once if not less, a year and thus causing international exchange is going to be an important thing for the future development of our game. I'm glad to be part of this with my visit to Patras.
With as little as 2 hours of sleep, we grabbed a breakfast, which actually was surprisingly good. I had something with banana, bread and sugar. At first, it did not look that tasteful but I decided to give it a try anyway and liked it so much that I even ended up taking a second one. We, again, did not want to try out luck and ordered a taxi which drove us to the airport. We arrived quite early, but well, better than too late for obvious reasons. Upon arriving at the airport, we decided to just go to the gates as soon as possible. Somehow, both of us were picked for a security check. Fun!
The guy in front of us also was picked out. Upon going through some detection device, an alarm went off for him (and it did too for Dennis and me). Amazing, just what we were waiting for. They took some weird thing and put it on my shoes, hands, chest and then analyzed it.. and determined that nothing was found (same for Dennis and the other, unknown, guy) and we could continue. Still, something that makes you think "What if.." "Let's hope nothing bad.." etc. We still had quite some time to kill, after getting some much necessary supplies, we decided to play the "Athens airport open barrage tournnament", again, I won this prestigious title 3 to 2 with blue winning all 5 games.
 |
| Final game of the barrage series @ Athens Airport |
I think I somewhat jinxed some bad luck upon us. I jokingly said I expected at least one hour delay as we would be traveling with Transavia (traNSavia) which contains "NS" which means Dutch Railways.. we ended up having, indeed, some delay. I think it totaled to 1 hour 30 in the end because of bad weather at Schiphol. At first it was announced that the flight would be delayed for one hour. 15 minutes after this announcement, some thing must have changed as suddenly the boarding started. We boarded the plane and found out that the plane was not allowed to take off (due to the bad weather at Schiphol). The crew informed us that they would be requesting special permission and that they would be reporting back within 5 minutes. The 5 minutes were not met, but nonetheless, the special permission was granted so we would be taking off in +- 10 minutes. The flight itself was smooth as it should be. We were both quite tired so we mostly tried to rest a little, I actually wrote some stuff on my phone (mostly pointers for this story) so I would not forget them later, but besides that, I tried to rest which was not very succesful.
 |
| Delays |
 |
| Bye Greece |
 |
| Bye Greece #2 |
 |
| Above the skies |
Upon arriving at Schiphol we had a passport check and that was it. We were officially back in the Netherlands. We thanked each other for the pleasant journey and parted ways. I went to the train station where my expectations were fully met; delays. After arriving home I found out something that I did not really like, due to baggage space, I had given Marshal Lopix to Dennis (in exchange I had gotten him one too) and we had forgotten that he was carrying my Marshal Lopix. Upon finding out I jokingly said to Dennis "I hope you'll take care of him properly" about 30 minutes later he sent me a picture of a pizzabox with Marshal Lopix to ensure he was being taken care of just fine. I did also notice some salad, I'm not sure whether Marshal Lopix liked that or not.
 |
| Marshal Lopix not having any reasons to be unhappy staying with Dennis |
 |
| +5 turned into +15 eventually |
Special thanks to:
(1) John Vandoros: Game and fun pics
(2) Pasxalis Tzenos: Close game and showing interest in my Stratego graveyard management method
(3) George Petroulakis: Game and the terrace drinks
(4) Charlie Palley: Game, somewhat of a traveling partner and of course representing clowns
(5) Dennis Baas: Traveling partner, two second places in the prestigious barrage tournaments and currently taking care of Marshal Lopix
(6) Anastasios Koukas: Short chat
(7) Angel Baron (and his parents): Game and settling a forum dispute in a basic manner
(8) Georgios Trypanagnostopoulos: Special invitation and some interesting Stratego talks.
(9) Dimitrios Bougatsas: Lift and good talks
(10) Spyros Vandoros: Game and interesting talks
(11) Gregory Adamakis: Game, talks and being our driver and ensuring we had a good lunch
(12) Ioannis Fytilakos: Talks, being the owner of the selfie stick and being a good guide in informing us about mountains, nature area's, history etc
(13) Georgios Papalexopoulos: My first game in Greece ever and a good chat about the game afterwards
(14) Nikolaos Mandalos: Very pleasant chats and accepting my challenge to play a game online
(15) Marilina Verra: Very pleasant chats too and revealing once more that Stratego players are very diverse in their other activities
Ioannis's Selfie stick: goes without saying.
And many others..
 |
| Group pics |
To summarize, it has been a great trip and experience. I'm definitely planning on returning some time.. probably soon 😊. While playing Stratego online and in national/local tournaments is a lot of fun too, meeting people you will see, maybe, once if not less, a year and thus causing international exchange is going to be an important thing for the future development of our game. I'm glad to be part of this with my visit to Patras.
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