Greetings from Germany. (Disclaimer: I’ve been awake for almost 24 hours, please excuse my typos.)
Yesterday we cleaned the house and said our goodbyes to Oscar before hitting the road to arrive in Seattle around 3:30 p.m. I was a little stressed because traffic was bad, as usual and that delayed us a little bit. Since we flew business class, check in was pretty quick, however, we had a long walk to the only TSA precheck line.
Once we got to the checkpoint line, the staff managing the line looked at Jacob’s ticket and told us to go to checkpoint 2 which was almost all the way back where we started. Once we got to checkpoint 2 we realized there was no TSA precheck and walked all the way back to checkpoint 4. This time we were let through and got in line and breezed through.
Once through we started walking to our gate. I wanted to stop and fill up my water bottle. Jacob decided to fill up his water bottle too. When he went to grab it the water bottle flew like cannon out of his hand, hitting the wall and spilling most of his water all over the place (hence the quote for the blog today). We tried to clean it up the best we could but this was going to require professionals to remedy.
So we left the scene.
We arrived at our gate with plenty of time and boarded with group 1.
We learned before our flight we’d have to wear masks the whole time and we’d also be wearing masks during the train. So it’s been 10+ hours of mask wearing and I’m out of practice. And it certainly was not comfortable attempting to sleep on the plane wearing a mask.
(Devoted readers, my original draft didn’t get saved and I am now attempting to rewrite from here forward! I’m sad about all my incredibly witty remarks that were lost and I am so tired I can barely remember what I wrote.)
Neither of us slept well on the plane, even though I could fully stretch out with the seat down. Jacob said he is still not the right size for planes. Although he could stand up at his seat and had plenty of head room.
I read a book and listened to Encanto. I have a rule of only watching children’s movies on planes. I need the joy! Unfortunately, all of their selections, I had already seen.
We were fed dinner shortly after boarding. We were fed breakfast around 3 a.m., or about an hour before we landed. Highlight of the flight was definitely the dessert and free wine.
We had some turbulence over Canada but for the most part the flight was smooth.
When we landed, we did not arrive at a gate but instead took a flight of stairs off the plane, onto the tarmac and then got on a bus that dropped us off at the terminal. When we stepped out of the plane, we both said, “summer!” It was a nice 88 degrees outside.
The bus ride along the tarmac was pretty cool, we drove behind all these huge planes getting ready to fly all over the world.
When we arrived to the terminal, customs went quickly and so did picking up our bags. We had planned for waits and delays so that and our plane arriving 20 minutes early meant we were ahead of schedule and had about 3 hours to burn before our train to Munich.
We left the airport and went to the train station which is connected. When we got there I spotted a Starbucks and declared a need for caffeine. We sat for a while before gathering our things and checking out where we’d board the train.
We stopped by a bakery in the station and picked up some pretzels. (Jacob pretzel count: 1). From there we decided to walk back down to where we’d board the train and sit and wait. I began to feel very tired and decided to listen to Rick Steves advice to keep moving, so I stood up and walked some.
Unfortunately our train was a little delayed, but we are now on our way to Munich. We will arrive around 8 p.m. or 11 a.m. your time. Our hotel is right across the street from the train station so we should hopefully have no trouble finding it. We pick up our rental car in the morning.
Coincidentally, we have a friend who is in Salzburg, Austria for a conference so we are going to meet up with them tomorrow for brunch. Then we will be on our way to our destination of Bled, Slovenia. Tuesday will be a three country kind of day! The temperatures are hot, hot, hot here and will stay that way. Luckily, most of our accommodations have AC so we won’t melt too much.
Feels good to be traveling again, feels weird COVID is still raging.
Looking forward to seeing Slovenia tomorrow.
Until then!
Update: 9:42 p.m.
After I ended the blog earlier I went to find a toilet on the train only to discover almost all of them were out of service. The toilet I did find that was working, had a sink overflowing. It was interesting. And also interesting because several people spoke to me in German and luckily the answer was Ja!
We are now checked into our hotel which is across the street from the train station. Yes, we did find it for those of you who were worried! Jacob is exhausted and I’m starving. The hotel was supposed to have a 24/7 snack bar but it seems to be closed for some odd painting club so instead I’m eating a breakfast bar and having a cup of tea. I don’t want to deal with anymore crowds today.
I’m looking forward to getting our car tomorrow. This was a very long day of crowded transit!