Nick Mutchler, Plus3 Greece, Summer 2026
The trip to Athens was riddled with many twists and turns, and the first one happened before we even had a schedule. We were originally supposed to go to Cyprus, but the program got relocated to Greece before we left. That was just the first of many hiccups on the way over.
Our flight from Pittsburgh to London went fine, a little turbulence, but nothing I hadn’t seen before. It was once we landed in Heathrow that I noticed something a little concerning. There was no gate printed on my boarding pass for the flight from Heathrow to Athens, just a blank space where the number should have been. I assumed there was some small error, followed the rest of the group to the gate, and figured everything was fine.
I waited at the gate with everyone else, no issue, but once the plane started boarding the line formed, I got hit with a surprise. My professor, four students, and I got bumped off the flight while the rest of the group boarded without us. They rebooked us onto the next flight, several hours later. Just like that, I was stranded in a foreign airport with what were essentially five strangers.
Honestly, those few hours I spent waiting ended up being the real starting point of the trip in my head. As a group we found somewhere to sit down and get food, complain about the airline, and bond over the classes that we all barely made it through last semester. At some point in there we stopped being strangers and became an actual group. By the time we boarded I knew everyone’s hometowns, their majors, and their very strong opinions on British Airways. We landed in Athens at around 2 a.m., but we were already close, we had skipped past the awkward part.
Everyone else in the program got a little more sleep, but they still had to work to build those friendships over the first few days. I got mine in a terminal, out of a mess that I was lucky enough to be thrown into. And somehow I even ended up a few hundred dollars richer for the trouble, courtesy of Birish Airways.
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