Retirement Ramblings

After many hours of sleep, I awoke to my first day in Frankfurt. Since I hadn’t gotten beyond the Frankfurt train station while in Germany last year, I decided to spend a couple of days here before heading to Switzerland. After breakfast, I headed out toward the city center – 3 train stops away – and wandered around until I found the Römer – or city hall. There was a wedding out front – and the “platz,” or plaza, in front of it is, architecturally, very German. On the way there, I entered St. Katharin Church, and noted that a free organ concert was scheduled there later in the day. I also found Paulskirche, which was built as a church, and was later used for the German parliament in the 1800s. During World War II, it was destroyed in Allied bombing in 1944; the church was rebuilt immediately after the war, as a symbol of the survival of democracy and re-dedicated in 1948. Now it is used for special occasions, like the annual presentation of a German award for lite...

It was all I could do yesterday to get to my room at the hostel and collapse.   So much for a blog entry! The trip to Reykjavik was a full eight hours. Without the benefit of airline movies, it felt really long. My seatmate was a young man who had just finished high school and was traveling to Europe for the first time to visit cousins studying in Edenborough. It was fun to sense his excitement – and to share the tediousness of the eight hours. While it was still light, I was able to see some gorgeous, snow-capped mountains.   Given the timing within the flight, I’m guessing they were the Canadian Rockies. I read and knitted and made plans for the days in Frankfurt, and read some more and knitted some more. Finally, we arrived in Reykjavik at 4:00 AM their time.   A bus took us from the plane to the terminal. It was 2 degrees above freezing, and there was light drizzle.   I was wearing sandals, and I quickly put on a sweatshirt over my tee-s...

I’m on the plane – a WOW Air flight to Reykjavik, Iceland, where I’ll change planes for a flight to Frankfurt. WOW is the newest “no frills” airline, and they had a particularly low round-trip fare leaving SFO on April 28 th with a return on June 15 th , so here I am.   The flight attendant just announced that they would be selling food, drinks, and entertainment system rentals. No free in-flight movies on THIS flight! It’s felt like a discombobulated 24 hours, beginning with my credit card being refused yesterday morning. I had a hard time deciding what Eurail pass to buy. There are so many choices! So I waited until yesterday morning to buy it.   Then I discovered that it had to be delivered to me; I couldn’t just print it out at home.   I realized that one-day delivery wouldn’t work because I needed to leave the house at 9:00 AM to arrive at the airport the standard 3 hours ahead of time for an international flight. So .. . . I called the Eur...