Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Everyone seemed to sleep well after our very tiring and long trip.
Matthew and I had a bit of an adventure in Frankfurt on the way here. We had a 4 hour layover and we decided to go into the city for a short visit. By the time we figured out how to get out of the Frankfurt airport, we only had 3.5 hours. We managed to get on a train heading to the city. We had only changed enough money for our train fare, because we forgot about lunch. While in Frankfurt we found an outdoor street fair that looked good. Unfortunately none of the booths took credit cards, so we used our return train fair to eat lunch. It was a great lunch, btw, of german rindwurst and fries. Then we went back to the train station and discovered that the train ticket machine only took European credit cards. Not to worry, there were several banks nearby. We went to the first one at 1:02 and discovered that banks close from 1pm to 2pm for lunch! I begged the clerk to just change $20 to Euros for us so we could get back to the airport. She said, no of course not, come back at 2pm. We are closed for it is after 1pm! All the other banks also were closed. Since our plane was leaving at 3pm and we still had to get to the airport and go through customs and security we were in trouble! We decided to hail a taxi. The taxi took us on the Autobahn and was going 180 km.hr (about 110 mph) while we whipped through traffic. When we got to the airport we ended up having to go through 3 separate security screenings because the airport was layed out in a really strange manner. So much for German engineering. We made it back in time for the flight, but realized that was a very expensive hotdog lunch! But, who knows when we will ever be back in Germany, so it was OK. It was an exciting part of our trip. Too exciting probably.