Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Monday morning, after months of planning, we were finally off to Germany. The first leg of our trip was from home to Minneapolis driven by Nate's parents. We made it to the airport in plenty of time and swiftly got through security. Somehow I got through with a fork and a big bottle of Mary Kay moisturizer in my carry-on....so much for airport security!

From Minneapolis we flew to Philly where we ate authentic Philly cheese steak sandwiches and Nate drank a Yuengling beer (I guess it's the oldest brewery in America and is located on the east coast..)

Next was the big fight over the pond. Surprisingly the flight was only about 25% full. Probably a comment on the state of many airlines these days. Everyone ended up laying out across rows of seats for comfy sleeping. Everyone except us that is. We weren't quick enough to the empty rows and ended up having to stay in our normal seats.

After only 7 hours of flying, getting off the plane was surely a culture shock. We were set to meet Jenny at the Bad Endorf train station at 11:45 and only had 3 hours to figure out the train system. Luckily the man at the ticket booth spoke English and helped us buy train tickets. We needed to go from the airport to Munich East to Rosenheim to Bad Endorf. It turns out we could have just compressed those stops into one ticket, but Nate and I wanted to make it interesting, so we just bought the first leg with the nice English-speaking man and fumbled our way through the electronic kiosks for the other legs of the journey.

When most Americans think of a train/subway system, it usually comes with crowds, dirt, and creepy people. From what we've seen of the German train system, it seems much different. There were not many people, there was plenty of open seating, and it was very clean.


Jenny was there at the train station to pick us up right on time and we made our way on our last leg of the journey to our new home in Hoslwang.