Monday June 29th Heading to Europe

Got up early, went for a run, packed and headed to the airport. Jon wasn’t doing well because work was piling up and his facebook account got hacked, so it wasn’t a good time to spend 24 hours offline.

First flight to Washington DC. Mostly uneventful. Read the Sunday New York Times, didn’t finish it until Brussels. Girl in front of us got sick.

3 hour layover in DC. Walked the airport. Get milkshakes.

Flight to Brussels. I was really nervous about this flight, about getting claustrophobic and bored. But we weathered it pretty well despite the flight having some seriously sucky circumstances. We were sitting next to a mother and 2 year old daughter who kept crying and getting sick throughout the night. Thankfully she switched with the man on the aisle so they could have easy access to the bathroom, but that guy was even worse. He was super talkative and grumpy. He gave us a 30 minute lecture on what to do in Germany, continuing even after dinner was over and we started watching dvds. Jon’s video monitor wasn’t working so we watched 4 episodes of The Wire, Season 3. We didn’t really sleep on the plane either, so we were pretty groggy when we arrived in Brussels at 7:30am.

Tuesday June 30th

Then we hussled through the airport and caught a short flight to Frankfurt. We got our rental car—my first time driving a Fiat, surprisingly stick shift. We headed out for our hotel in Mainz, Germany on the Rhine. The GPS was out of batteries and the cigarette lighter was broken so we couldn’t use it. I had a backup map printed out, but as I started following the highway signs to Mainz, we couldn’t really tell where we were on the pre-printed directions. Once we got to Mainz and didn’t know where the hell we were, we got off the highway and drove around until we found a gas station. The dudes there were extremely helpful, we bought a map and they wrote out directions for us. Following those directions and my gut, I got us to the hotel. Luckily, they let us check in early. It was just 11:30am local time, but we hadn’t slept at all the night before.

We slept for 3 hours. Jon started computing and I showered and went to explore the area. I went to find an ATM and again local people were superfriendly and helpful. An older gentleman walked me around the corner to show me where the bank was, and then when I still didn’t see it, we walked me down the block to find it.

I went back to the hotel, got Jon and we walked around town around a lot of the pedestrian streets until we found a tapas restaurant for dinner. Most of the places that looked like restaurants ended up being bars and Then we walked down to the Rheine River and around town. And we stopped to get some awesome icecream sundaes that we had seen everyone eating.

Back to the hotel and we fought to stay awake until at least 9:30pm, so we watched an episode of The Wire and then slept a good 10 hours.