Alternative title: A Tale of 48 hours 🤪
We’re headed back to Germany! We’ve been trying to keep up having the kids learning German with tutors since we started homeschooling them the last 2 years. It’s hit or miss whether they like learning German. Our idea was to take them to Germany and have them be our translators. Have positive experiences with the German language and people. Hoping this will keep them motivated on the language.
We left Anchorage at 9pm on Thursday and arrived in Seattle at 1am. A bit brutal but all we had to do was get ourselves to the hotel shuttle and then pass out for a few hours.
After some wonderful rest we hit up the hotel pool and workout facility to move our muscles before we sit on a plane for 10 hours.
The hotel was extremely busy with cruise ship passengers coming and going so we had to check out by noon. Even though our flight wasn’t leaving till 5pm. This meant we had some time to kill. We decided to walk to the airport and hope to check in.
Unfortunately we were so early there wasn’t anyone at the Condor counters to check us in. So we sat there for an hour or so till staff started to arrive.
This seemed to be the beginning of our day of waiting. Once we checked in we went to the Alaska lounge. It was wonderful to get some food and I actually ended up napping for a bit.
We finally got our seat assignments and we were seated 2 and 2. So R and I sat together. Across the middle four seats then Ty and L sat together. Row 43 out of 50! It was a big plane. And extremely old we realized when we got on! The screens didn’t work, the USB and outlets didn’t work. We were on our own for entertainment devices which was fine but the lack of charging definitely made me nervous.
Thankfully we all slept a bit and that saved our devices. L was the only one who’s device ran out of batteries. We landed in Frankfurt and went to get our suitcases before finding the train. And we waited… thirty minutes we finally got a suitcase. Then we waited… thirty minutes we got 2 more suitcases. Then we waited… no further suitcases were coming out and R still didn’t have hers. Ty finally was able to track down some support and they determined her bag never left Seattle! Ugh – but not totally surprised with as much as we travel, I felt like it was bound to happen to us at some point. So, Ty arranged to have the bag on the next available flight and we’re hoping it’ll catch up with us in Nuremberg or our next town of Munich. Fingers crossed…
After we got that arranged we walked to the train station. Where we of course just missed the last train and needed to wait an hour for the next one…
We got on the train and it was a 2 hour ride to Nuremberg. I think we were all glad for chargers and some quiet alone time with our devices. It really is the most honest way for us to get a break from all our together time as we travel.
Wonderfully our hotel was right across the street from the train station. After waiting again, to check in, we quickly dropped our bags, shoved a donut in everyone and headed to H&M to get R a few necessaries to get her through the next few days. (I hope that’s all we need to get her through.) After some power shopping at H&M we got the kids some burgers at 5 Guys, and Ty and I tried the Nuremberg bratwurst. It’s like three tiny brats in a round bun, nothing noteworthy, but we tried it. Then back to the hotel, I rinsed L off in the tub, and tried to do the same for R but she was already asleep. We all crashed early to bed and can’t wait to explore more of this beautiful town tomorrow.
