Urban Sketch of a Family at Athens Airport Early Morning

Trains and Automobiles Adventure to reach Greece

We had a long journey to Crete but I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to sketch the people we passed along the way. The train journey wasn’t a good opportunity to sketch because of our seats. But in Lisbon we went for something to eat in the Mall opposite the Oriente train station. We’ve been in that food hall before but hadn’t realised that there was a second level to it, and this level has much nicer decor and seating areas.

Urban Sketch at the Mall

Urban Sketch at Lisbon Airport

Airports are one of my favourite locations to sketch so I was really looking forward to spending a few hours at Lisbon Airport with my sketchbook and pen, but by the time we got there it was already 10 o’clock at night and we’d been traveling since early afternoon, so I only managed to catch this one chap in the departure lounge while we were waiting for our flight to board.

Urban Sketch at Lisbon Airport

Our flight left Lisbon just before midnight and then got into Athens local time about 5:30 in the morning. It was a scramble trying to find the right departure gate for the next flight. The departure boards all had the locations in Greek, which is fair enough because we’re in Greece, but when they flashed to the English versions so quick, that by the time you’d located your flight name, the information had switched back to Greek and then you had to try and figure out which line was your line in Greek. If you’ve had a good night sleep then that was probably easy enough, but when you’ve been traveling and it’s actually 3 o’clock in the morning your own time it was more like trying to decode Double-Dutch.

It was good to finally get a little more sketching done. It always feel like it’s wasted opportunity to travel on trains and planes, and not sketch, but I think it’s because it was a night flight I really wasn’t in the sketching.

We finally got the right departure gate in Athens, and sat opposite this family of three people, a man and a wife and his daughter.

The flight to Crete was delayed a little bit, and we were so happy to finally arrive at our destination. There were a local bus service that would take us directly to our accommodation, but by that time in our journey, I really just couldn’t be bothered so we jumped in a taxi to get there quickly. We were really grateful that we could get an early check-in to our accommodation so it was straight to bed to catch up on our lost sleep.

Hopefully when I wake up I’ll be more enthusiastic about sketching. This really was a disappointing start to my Greek Island sketching trip!