Cruise Ship

“The best laid plans of mice and men oft gang somewhere else.” We flew from Naples to Athens to catch our boat for the weeklong cruise. A traffic jam held us up on the way from the airport to the port. We eventually got there, but with less than two hours to spare before the boat left. However, we couldn’t find the dock for the boat. We asked numerous people, got many suggestions for finding the correct dock, but no boat. Finally, after an hour of searching, and getting perilously close to departure time, we went to the port authority. They had never heard of the boat! Oh, my gosh! We were in Athens, Greece, and had been scammed.

After the authorities searched through their records at greater length, they finally found the boat’s name but said it obviously wasn’t there. They searched further and managed to come up with a phone number. With pity upon two despairing, bedraggled and exhausted foreigners, they called the company and there was an English speaker who gave us another phone number of someone in Athens. After another call or two, we found the boat trip had been cancelled because of mechanical problems. They had tried to contact us, but we had already left on this trip. The boat company seemed apologetic and offered us a compromise: they would refund what we had paid for the cruise, would give us a free ticket for a future cruise, would pay the cost of our trip from Naples to Athens and would give us plane tickets to Mykanos and pay our hotel there for a week. So here we are.