Leaving For Greece

 
In two previous entries I have told you about my time in Italy and in Switzerland, but let me start from the beginning of how that trip came to be.  It was the spring of 1990.  I had just finished five and a half years of college in order to get my four-year degree in Marketing at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  I had graduated the previous December and had been saving every penny for me and my girlfriend Lona's upcoming dream trip to Greece in April with our roomate Claudia Tribbiani.  Lona and I knew nothing about Greece, but Claudia had visited there almost two years earlier and had not stopped talking about it ever since.  She wanted to go back and she wanted us to come with.  The beautiful islands, the clear blue water of the Mediterranean Sea, the incredibly friendly people, the cheap living, the amazing history…it was all there.  I loved to travel and had been all over the country following the Grateful Dead around for the previous five years, but I had never been overseas and was not sure I needed to go all the way to Greece for good times.

 

Claudia was relentless though and never wavered in her commitment to get me and Lona to go there with her.  I was still unconvinced until one fateful evening in the spring of 1989 when she pulled out her trump card and forever changed my life.  She returned home from the video rental store, opened up a bottle of wine, sat Lona and I down on the couch and popped a tape of ‘Summer Lovers’ into the VCR.  Summer Lovers is a 1982 movie starring Daryl Hannah, Peter Gallagher and the beautiful French actress Valerie Quennessen.  Basically it was how a young American couple (Daryl and Peter) go to the Greek islands for the summer.  They are amazed by the beauty and freedom of the place…the relaxed, laid back atmosphere and of course the nude beaches.  They meet the French girl (Valerie) and they start a summer-long threesome.  Not technically the greatest movie, but holy crap it had me hook, line and sinker on the idea of going to the Greek islands with two women!

 

It was decided...we were going to Greece!  And then we figured that since we were already over there we would go see more of Europe after Greece.  So for one full year we meticulously planned our journey.  We pored over maps, read books, did research, bought backpacks, got our passports, got Eurail passes and most importantly - saved our money.  Through various questionably legal means I had managed to save up $14,000 for Lona and I over the previous few years.  Mostly by selling various items in the parking lots on tour with the Dead, including tie-dyed tee-shirts, beer, mixed drinks, clothes from Guatemala and Bali that a friend of mine had imported…whatever I could sell.  It was incredibly profitable, paying for me to travel the country while I still managed to save a lot of money.  I kept all of the cash in stacked piles of rubber-banded $500 bundles in my sock drawer.

 

After carefully researching the various banks in Minneapolis I finally decided on a downtown bank that did not charge a fee for travelers checks.  It was March, about a month before we were scheduled to fly out of Chicago for Athens.  I called the bank and told them I was coming in to open an account with a large deposit.  Then I loaded up all the piles of 20’s, 50’s and 100 dollar bills into a duffel bag and made my way to the bank.  I was not sure how to proceed when I got there, so I got in line with all the rest of the customers.  When I finally got up to the counter I leaned over and quietly told the guy I wanted to open an account with a lot of cash to deposit.  He told me okay, hand it over.  I padded the duffel bag and told him it was a lot of cash.  He seemed unconcerned in the least and said that’s fine, let him have it.  I shrugged my shoulders, unzipped the bag and started dumping piles of money onto the counter while the people behind me gasped.  It was weird, like I was doing the exact opposite of robbing a bank.  A shifty-looking guy in a black leather jacket with hair most of the way down his back in a bank emptying a duffel bag full of cash.

 

The previously unimpressed bank teller instantly freaked out and did a spread-eagle belly-flop onto the pile of cash like a soldier jumping on a landmine.  “No, no, don’t do that here!” he shouted.  "Come around back with me!”  So after quickly scooping all the money back into the bag and calling for someone else to take over his teller spot, he led me around through a secure door into a back room where we sat and counted money for about an hour.  He was young and excited and acted like he had never seen that much money.  Luckily, this was shortly before a law was passed that whenever you deposit more than $10,000 in cash you have to account to the Feds as to where the money came from.  I would have been screwed.  So I safely deposited the $14,000.  Then shortly before we left for Greece I took out $7,000 in travelers checks, $3,000 in cash which I left at Lona’s parents house in Waukesha, WI where we would be temporarily living whenever we got back, and I left $4,000 in the Minneapolis bank for the future.

 

Even though we had done a lot of planning and preparation, our overall plan was still very uncertain and open to change.  The loose plan was that Lona and I would fly one-way to Athens with Claudia, spend a few days there on the mainland, and then jump on a boat and start island-hopping around the Greek islands.  Claudia would be with us for 2 months, but after that we were on our own as she would have to come back home.  Then the two of us would continue on for a month or two until our money dwindled down to the point where we had to cash in our 1-month Eurail passes.  Then we would use those to wind our way through Europe until we got to Ireland.  We would stay in Dublin until all our money had run out and then we would fly home.

 

It was not just planning a vacation though, it was also planning the complete changing of our lives.  I had graduated from college and wanted to come back to Minneapolis and make a life there where all my friends were, but Lona was a few years younger than me and really missed her family.  She wanted to live closer to them in Waukesha as the five-hour drive home was too long for her.  Finally I agreed that we would move out of Minneapolis.  So in the weeks leading up to the trip, we also had to pack up all of our belongings and move them down to Lona’s parent’s basement.

 

I knew I did not want to live in Waukesha where I had grown up and went to high school…it would feel like I was moving backwards.  And Lona did not want to live in Minneapolis…too far from her family.  So the vague plan was that whenever we got back from Europe we would live at her parent’s house until we got acclimated to being back in the States.  Then we would use the cash I had stashed there to move, possibly to Madison, WI.  It seemed like a good compromise.  Madison is a somewhat big, somewhat happening city, yet only an hour from her family.  We did not know anybody that lived there so it would be a fresh, exciting way to start our post-college, post vacation-of-a-lifetime lives.

 

As the fateful day to leave for Greece grew closer, we starting packing our backpacks.  These packs would hold everything we needed for the next 6 months or so.  Our entire lives would be in our packs.  We wanted to go as light as possible so we just packed 5 tee-shirts, 5 pairs of underwear/socks, a few pairs of shorts, bathing suits, a light jacket, toiletries…and most importantly, the acid.  How would we get LSD into Greece?  We wouldn’t need much…maybe 10 hits each and we could trip once on every island.  So I cut a small quarter-inch slit in the inner lining waistband of one of my pairs of shorts and carefully slid the quarter-inch by three-inch strip of paper acid into the waistband.  I was nervous about it, but I kept telling myself it was completely undetectable and it would be so worth it once we got there.  Tripping in Greece…literally!

 

Finally the day had arrived.  We had moved out of our apartment in Minneapolis and all of our stuff was in Lona’s parent’s house.  Claudia’s mom drove us down to Chicago for the long flight to Athens, with a layover in Frankfurt.  The next day we finally arrived in the old Athens International Airport and taxied to the terminal.  It looked like a decrepit, rundown old building but the most frightening thing was the large military tank with soldiers standing all around it awaiting our plane.  Had they somehow found out about the LSD in my shorts?  Were they going to arrest me as soon as I got off the plane?  They were all carrying machine guns.  Were they going to shoot me?  I had seen the movie ‘Midnight Express’…were they going to throw me in a Turkish prison?  That made no sense since we were in Greece, but I was still pretty nervous as I walked out of the plane door and squinted into the bright sunlight.

 

We walked down the steps to the concrete tarmac, past the tank and the row of machine gun-carrying soldiers eyeing us carefully and then into the run-down old terminal.  I got my baggage and that was it!  We had made it!  I had to pee so I went into the bathroom but there were no toilets or urinals.  There were literally just holes in the ground with what are called ‘elephant feet’ on either side of the hole to stand on if you have to poop.  You were supposed to put one foot one on either side of the hole and squat.  Gross.  Fortunately I just had to pee so I stood over the smelly mess and aimed down into the hole.  Then with all three of our backpacks secure we jumped into a cab and headed for Athens.  The beginning of our 4-month adventure in Greece and then 2 more months in the rest of Europe had begun!  Many more stories to come, especially about the various escapades on the many Greek islands we would visit.