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#41
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iPhone 5 with GSM? Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
On 2011-07-03 22:25:49 -0500, poldy said:
In article 2011070312581922832-stephedanospam@maccom, Dan Stephenson wrote: On 2011-06-25 07:57:44 -0500, Alexander Arnakis said: BTW, having a mobile phone in Greece is a must, and is cheap. Just bring your own GSM phone and get a local prepaid SIM card from Vodafone or Wind. Mobile telephony is one of the few things that work really well in Greece. (The SIM cards can be "topped off" at any kiosk.) If you are a couple and have two phones, and get the SIM cards from the same company, calls between you are free. Also, all incoming calls are free. You get charged for air time only if *you* place the call. I have CDMA Verizon iPhone 4; I hear the iPhone 5 due in October will have both CDMA and GSM. If so, it might be worth getting for overseas use. The Google Translate app is JUST AMAZING. Now I have a chance at the locals understanding me when I inquire on the location of ancient ruins. I can pre-save a number of translations, but anything on-the-fly needs the network. Unless you plan to use mobile data, you can just use the iPhone 4 in Wifi mode. Sure, such as w/ Skype. But I will not be in wifi outside the hotel. How will Google Translate handle the Greek alphabet? Or are you talking about letting it speak the translation for you? It does both! Check it out. Google's web-page version does both too. It is amazing. And it does Latin, too! heh -- Dan Stephenson http://web.mac.com/stepheda Travel pages for Europe and the U.S.A. (and New Zealand too) |
#42
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Google Maps, the Best Guide Books, and Sparta iPhone 5 with GSM? Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
On 2011-07-04 08:11:45 -0500, Martin said:
On Mon, 4 Jul 2011 07:40:31 -0500, Dan Stephenson wrote: It does both! Check it out. Google's web-page version does both too. It is amazing. And it does Latin, too! heh For "when in Rome ..."? :-) How accurate are Google Maps for Greece? When I say Google Maps, I am referring to the Satellite view, when I am hunting down ruins. I am also really looking forward to the next generation of aerial/satellite photography, with something that has higher resolution and better hires coverage. THEN I am really going to go crazy. This approach also works very well with locating hill forts and such as that, in the British Isles. I still think Kalamate is a better place to start. :-) Did you buy a Blue Guide to Greece, we found that the best book for locating ancient sites. We also missed Sparta. The weather was terrible and we gave up before we got there. No, I actually had no guide other than having read HB Cotterill's "Ancient Greece" several times (and a thick motoring atlas I picked up at the first petrol station). I picked it up in the Colosseum bookshop, of all places, back in my 2002 grand tour. When I got to the part about the Messenians being tranported across the gulf of Corinth to their new home -- I was on the ferry making the EXACT SAME PASSAGE. I am not kidding you. I read that portion of the text, and looked up, and BAM! there I was, 2,500 years ago, making the same passage. Totally cool. (on further thought, I did pick up a history book on the Peloponnese while I was there, with a great map in the back) I had the Blue Guide to Venice and it was clearly the best guidebook for Venice. It liked its maps too, as I recall. I will look for the Blue Guide for Greece. JJ Norwich's history on the Venetian republic was very good too and I read it while vacationing there some years back. I think people find as they travel more and more, it is less important to get hotel or restaurant recommendations that are one to several years old, than to get a good history or other description of what it is you want to see. The history of a place does not change. This is why "Ancient Greece" or History of Venice or Strolling Through Istanbul are such incredible GUIDE books. I can go to tripadvisor.com for accomodation recommendations. On Sparta. I only went there back in 2009, as a day trip from Monemvasia to look for a iPod because mine died and I needed its drive space for photos. Crawled into Sparta in my brand new Porsche Carrera 4S and its CRAZY traffic, and wind around for seemingly forever before I find a cramped car park where I hide my baby. Then I walked up and down the main street visiting electronics shops: no iPod Classic, the kind with the hard drive. But not all was lost. I visited a temple of Apollo on the way back, under excavation where soda cans were used as grid markers, and a big open tholos tomb in the rain. Wow, Greek mud is sticky. Finally back in Geyfra, the town on the mainland opposite Monemvasia, my hotel proprietor suggested a little shop in town, and while they too had no iPod Classic, they did have 250GB USB drives for sale. Not cheap, but I was able to offload photos from my computer hard drive. I had 200GB of photos by the time I got back home. Cool. What great memories. I think outside modern Sparta, there are a few ancient ruins, most Roman but some old Greek too. Not much, too, so I've also heard. I think the Romans did build city walls, though, and there are some traces of those. -- Dan Stephenson http://web.mac.com/stepheda Travel pages for Europe and the U.S.A. (and New Zealand too) |
#43
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
On 07/03/2011 08:00 PM, Dan Stephenson wrote:
On 2011-06-23 12:36:15 -0500, Tom P said: On 06/19/2011 03:24 AM, Dan Stephenson wrote: Hello, in the Fall I will travel to Greece, flying into Athens and heading to the Pelopponese by car, for maybe 10 days. There are several car rental places at the airport: Avis, Budget, Hertz, National/Alamo and Sixt. Can anyone recommend one more than the rest? I wouldn't be buying the high-dollar collision damage waiver. Thanks, I can't speak for Athens, but what you might want to consider are - does the company have an on-airport depot or do you have to wait for the courtesy bus and even worse, find the depot again when you return the car. Off-airport depots are a lot cheaper, but driving round at night in the back streets of some industry park looking for the depot while the time for your check-in ticks away is no fun. That is a good point. Sometimes "airport" car hire is something off-site, though somewhat nearby. Hey I just said "car hire" instead of "car rental", without thinking about that. I'm already getting in the travel mindset! whoo hoo! - do the airline and car rental company have a big fly&drive deal, in which case you may be standing in line for hours with all the other pax that booked fly&drive. What is fly&drive? and if I made a reservation -- I would expect the car to be there Some airlines or tour operators offer packages or special rates with specific car rental companies. The effect is that even if only 10% of the passengers on a 200 seat plane have booked this deal, then they will all arrive at the car rental desk at exactly the same time - and you probably know how long it takes just to get one customer serviced at a car rental desk. |
#44
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
On 2011-07-03, Mike Lane wrote:
Dan Stephenson wrote on Jul 3, 2011: I will have to look into this, thanks for the tip. I would also like to avoid the hassle of getting to and from Pieraeus from the airport, but the ferry time might be competitive with the drive time. To me the time taken is not important - I actually enjoy the travelling. What I don't enjoy is driving through the surroundings of airports and large towns like Athens. Does being on a bus make those areas more pleasant? Getting to Piraeus is no hassle. You get on a bus at the airport and get off at the harbour |
#45
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
Jesper Lauridsen wrote on Jul 5, 2011:
On 2011-07-03, Mike Lane wrote: Dan Stephenson wrote on Jul 3, 2011: I will have to look into this, thanks for the tip. I would also like to avoid the hassle of getting to and from Pieraeus from the airport, but the ferry time might be competitive with the drive time. To me the time taken is not important - I actually enjoy the travelling. What I don't enjoy is driving through the surroundings of airports and large towns like Athens. Does being on a bus make those areas more pleasant? No, but to get to Piraeus the bus goes down to the coast avoiding Athens, and someone else is driving. The route to the Peloponnese by road involves a far greater distance through ghastly urban sprawl. -- Mike Lane UK North Yorkshire mike_lane at mac dot com |
#46
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
On 2011-07-05 18:08:25 -0500, Mike Lane said:
No, but to get to Piraeus the bus goes down to the coast avoiding Athens, and someone else is driving. The route to the Peloponnese by road involves a far greater distance through ghastly urban sprawl. Not true, there is a big motorway that avoids all that mess. This is the appeal of renting from the airport directly. Like when i was scared of driving in Palermo; I took the bus into the city from the airport, visited on foot, then took the bus back to the airport to get the car. by the end, though, I was cool with italian driving. well, not 'cool', but not afraid anymore. I would have to wait for Greece to get that back. :-) -- Dan Stephenson http://web.mac.com/stepheda Travel pages for Europe and the U.S.A. (and New Zealand too) |
#47
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
On 2011-07-05 08:28:14 -0500, Tom P said:
Some airlines or tour operators offer packages or special rates with specific car rental companies. The effect is that even if only 10% of the passengers on a 200 seat plane have booked this deal, then they will all arrive at the car rental desk at exactly the same time - and you probably know how long it takes just to get one customer serviced at a car rental desk. Ah so my reservation will still be there, just that the line may be long. Well fortunately I pack extremely light and usually get to such places before everyone else! -- Dan Stephenson http://web.mac.com/stepheda Travel pages for Europe and the U.S.A. (and New Zealand too) |
#48
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
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#49
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
"Mike Lane" wrote in message dia.com... Jesper Lauridsen wrote on Jul 5, 2011: On 2011-07-03, Mike Lane wrote: Dan Stephenson wrote on Jul 3, 2011: I will have to look into this, thanks for the tip. I would also like to avoid the hassle of getting to and from Pieraeus from the airport, but the ferry time might be competitive with the drive time. To me the time taken is not important - I actually enjoy the travelling. What I don't enjoy is driving through the surroundings of airports and large towns like Athens. Does being on a bus make those areas more pleasant? No, but to get to Piraeus the bus goes down to the coast avoiding Athens, Whilst it may go along the coast, it doesn't avoid what most people would consider as Athens. About 80% of the bus route is through urban sprawl. and someone else is driving. The route to the Peloponnese by road involves a far greater distance through ghastly urban sprawl. OTOH 90% of the new motorway goes nowhere near any urban sprawl tim |
#50
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Recommendations for car rental from Athens Airport
M@gd@ wrote on Jul 6, 2011:
On Mon, 4 Jul 2011 09:28:03 +0100, in rec.travel.europe, Mike Lane arranged some electrons, so they looked like this: ... tim.... wrote on Jul 3, 2011: ... ... ... "Dan Stephenson" wrote in message ... news:2011070312452797074-stephedanospam@maccom... ... On 2011-06-24 16:39:16 -0500, Martin said: ... ... ... ATM skyscanner is showing flights from London to Kalamata ... ... Again you assume somebody is flying from London. ... ... Actually I will travel through London, as I intend to spend a few days ... there, to visit the British Museum again, and to visit more out-of-the-way ... places. I hear the Mayor is going to create a tourist scheme where you ... can visit along the Thames waterline to see some historical sights that ... have been blocked off from normal access. Anyone know more about this? ... ... But on the original suggestion: going through Athens has cost and ... logistical advantages.... I will into Kalamata, indeed, but the hardest ... part of the driving is about the same, since until Tripoli the driving is ... super-easy on the motorway. I don't suppose anybody knows if the bypass ... is finished yet? ... ... Both my maps show the by-pass as completed, but only one shows the road ... through the mountains to Kalamata as complete. ... ... But if you're going to Sparta you won't need that bit ... ... ... There's no particular reason to visit Sparta itself. It's a small modern town ... with very little (apart from the name) to connect it to the ancient ... city-state. The Spartans didn't go in for building much, it seems - too busy ... war-mongering I suppose. ... ... I stayed there after visiting Mystra which isn't far away. Not even a museum worth a visit? I believe there's a small one with a few bits and pieces on display, but as I say, nothing really worth a special visit. -- Mike Lane UK North Yorkshire mike_lane at mac dot com |
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