| Monday June 7 – Getting ready for tomorrow |
This morning, Noel, Linda, Igor and the technicians traveled to the Observatory
while Isabel and I stayed behind. We would not be needed until early afternoon
when we would go thorough our program in detail with the technology in place
as a dry-run. It is hard to sleep because of the din of traffic on the freeway
outside. The sound is very loud and constant. We all woke at around 7:00 AM
after only 6 hours sleep or less. It is, again, a beautiful clear day, so tomorrow’s
transit should be visible under ideal weather conditions!!
 We all woke up at 6:30 AM and Igor had to join the rest of the crew traveling to the observatory to set up equipment. Around 9:00 AM Isabel and I walked to the local plaza and hailed a cab for the Kifissia Metro. Isabel was headed into Athens to buy some gifts and I wanted to buy a backpack for my camera and other gear for my Thursday escapade. I walked around the business district at Kifissia for a few hours, had a breakfast croissant and juice at a café. All the stores were very upscale dress, shoe and miscellaneous fashion apparel stores. There were many cafes with sidewalk seating, and even a McDonald’s restaurant with no one inside! I marveled at the many large dogs sleeping on sidewalks, in storefronts, and just wandering through the traffic.
 But in all of this I found no stores that even remotely sold backpacks. Expensive Gucci handbags, yes, but no backpacks. So I wandered back to the metro station and after some effort hailed a cab to take me back to the apartment by 12:00 Noon. Of course as I walked the few short blocks to the apartment, I spied a local store with backpacks hanging on the store front! At 1:00 PM we drove to the observatory and spent the afternoon going over the script and images for the transit web cast. Clouds had rolled in ominously by 2PM and it was looking pretty dismal for tomorrow’s transit. Then thought that after all this effort we might be clouded out was too disturbing to consider. So we all diligently worried on our part of the big picture and finished by about 5:00 PM. We returned to the apartments, and agreed to go to dinner at a local Haufbrau restaurant/bar. We were rained on by this time, but the rain cleared by 6:00 PM and by then the sky was mostly clear again. The dinner lasted until 10:00 PM. Some of the group prepared to return to the observatory to do the critical polar alignments of the telescopes, while the rest of us returned to our apartments to get to sleep early. I showered, spent some time with this diary, and then hit the sack at 11:30 PM. Igor took the taxi to the observatory, and Isabel reviewed her notes for her segment of tomorrow’s show. All in all, it was a day with many parts, some stress, and a bit f anxiety about what tomorrow’s weather might bring. Still, it seemed like we would at least be guaranteed of a good start to the program with clear skies for First and Second Contact. It was, however, beginning to look that the afternoon might be more of a problem. |