If this picture looks like I'm sitting at home in my kitchen, I am. Having a glass of wine to help ease the pain of missing our first day of this well-planned vacation. To make a very long story short, our flight out of Appleton was "delayed" two hours, which meant a missed connection in Chicago. So the United agent in Appleton suggested that our best option might be to try for the Green Bay flight, then go standby on a later flight to Frankfurt. Unfortunately, he didn't let Green Bay know we were coming. So after a mad dash to Green Bay, we missed that flight. Another mad dash back to Appleton to catch the last flight out and - you guessed it - the plane was taxying down the runway as we pulled into the airport. Thanks so much to Dean & Ben for the valiant efforts to get us in the air today. It just wasn't meant to be. So 3 of us are back home in Oshkosh tonight. Two of us are in Frankfurt because they were smart and travelled a day ahead. And the other two are who knows where!! I'm hoping Jeff and Leigh are somewhere over the Atlantic as I write this, but we really have no idea. In a nutshell, today was a disaster. Kathleen, Amie and I are committed to laughing about this nightmare at some point along the way. We're just hoping to make it to Frankfurt sometime on Monday, and hope to somehow catch up with our friends on bikes along the route. With no German cell phones, that could get tricky.So here's my advice for today . . . never, ever fly United Airlines!! Personally, I've always had great luck with Delta, but thought we'd go with United this time because of the good connections. Bad idea. If the planes actually flew on schedule, it would be great. But apparently they don't. And when you're trying to make an international connection, that's a real problem . . . and very expensive. Not only will we lose the first day of our trip, we lose out on the hotel we've already paid for, the train ticket we've already paid for, and are now left to figure out how to get our rental bikes from one city to another, along with all of our luggage. This is not going to be pretty!!
But we're troopers and we're looking forward to starting again tomorrow. Please keep your fingers crossed that Sunday will be a better travel day. Hoping to arrive in Frankfurt early Monday morning. Weather prediction is looking good, so we're anxious to get on the bikes and start rolling. I hope the next post will actually include a frau with a bike! :-)
