June 26:
We had to get up early, early this morning: 3:45 a.m. We needed to be at the bus by 5:00 a.m. although Brother David asked us to be there by 4:45 a.m. Luckily this was a change from previous instructions that we had to leave the hotel at 3:00 a.m. Mike, our tour guide, said that getting to the airport 4 hours early was not necessary... so we got to sleep in... until 3:45!! Woo hoo! The hotel had breakfast bags to go for us and coffee and tea. Unfortunately, the tea water was cold so we couldn't make tea! After getting on the bus and heading to the airport, I looked at the breakfast - it did not look appetizing at all and it was so early that I decided not to eat.
We got to the airport, checked in (which took awhile even though we had a couple of agents attending to only us), and then went through security. We only had about a 1/2 hour before the boarding started. Lufthansa had free hot beverage machines (very nice) so I had a cafe mocha - yummy! It was strong but good. We then boarded our flight and took off close to on time. We were flying from Munich to Frankfort with a flight time of only 30 minutes. We didn't worry about sitting by our trip partners. I slept a lot of the flight.
After arriving in Frankfort, we took the tram to the C concourse. Brenda and I stopped and got a pretzel (gotta have a pretzel in Germany). We then had to go through passport control. It was nuts because we kept having to switch lines. They have special lines for European citizens and those lines are very short. Our lines were very long. We didn't realize there was a difference and got in the short line - noooooo, an airport official said we had to get in the correct line. So we moved over to the long lines. Shortly thereafter another airport official had us move over to the European passport control lines. The first guy saw us moving and ran over to find out what we were doing. The second guy told him so we got to stay in the short line. But then the passport control agent got upset that we were in his line since we were not European citizens. Ugh!! We finally did get through but it was a bit ridiculous. Now mind you there are like 25 of us moving back and forth, back and forth...
We then had to go through security AGAIN! We finally made it to the gate. Brother David and his wife, Linda had problems with their tickets and by the time they got it cleared up it was too late for them to take our flight. They got on a later one. After we waited for the pilot to finally show up (he was coming in on another flight), we finally got to board the plane for Chicago. It would be a flight time of about 8 hours and 10 minutes. I was able to switch seats and sit by Brenda for this long flight. We took off close to a 1/2 hour late. Shortly after takeoff, they served us drinks and a bag of crackers. A little while later we had lunch - an asian rice mixture, roll, salad, yogurt of some kind, and a cherry dessert. The rice mixture was a little warm for me.
We hit a bit of turbulence after lunch. Other than that it was an uneventful flight. We got up several times to walk around the plane or use the restroom. Of course, everytime I went to use the restroom, we would hit a small patch of turbulence!!
We arrived back in St. Louis safe and sound. It was an absolutely wonderful trip!!
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