Another Beginning (4/28)



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 28th with a return on June 15th, 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 Eurail office and a delightful attendant arranged to have the Eurail pass delivered to me where I’m staying in Frankfurt before I use it for the first time on May 2nd. Then I gave her my credit card, and it didn’t go through. She tried it a second time, and it was still declined. I could even see the declined transactions on line! The attendant was willing to stay on the phone with me while I called the credit card company to inquire about the decline! As I was put on hold, the attendant described her own trip to Switzerland to “test” the Eurail services so she could talk with clients about them. Finally, the credit card company told me I’d been declined because the Eurail office was in White Plains, New York, and they knew I was in California. Weird, in that internet purchases have not been declined, nor have my purchases from vendors from out of town at sewing or knitting marketplaces. Oh, well . . . I guess I should be grateful that the company keeps such a good watch on my credit card – and I am!  But by this time, I was running late for my lunch with Sally Brown.
And so it went for the rest of the day. The “boys” and I ordered pizza for dinner last night from our favorite San Mateo shop. I went to bed, hoping to get a good night’s sleep, but also wanting to finish both a book on CD and a “paper” book before I left. I woke up at 3:00 AM to find that the CD player was on, and I was in the middle of a CD. I read the rest of the hardcover library book and then listened to more of the CD.  I guess I finished the CD book, but I want to listen to the last few CDs again when I get home.  Anyway, it wasn’t the greatest sleep I’ve ever had …
The “boys” and I had breakfast together this morning and then they took me to the airport. Whew!  It was CROWDED going through TSA! I don’t remember seeing so many people, although usually, on my trips with students, we left at weird times so there wouldn’t have been this kind of a crowd. The plane finally took off toward the north, so that we passed the South City sign and got a glimpse of the Bay Bridge before the fog closed in. I’m on my way.  The adventure begins!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ballenberg (6/10)

Off I went to Ballenberg this morning, after reluctantly checking out of my lovely little room with the great view. I caught a bus at the train station, which took me through a neighborhood – almost a “subdivision” – of chalets (I don’t think of chalets as being in subdivisions, but that’s what this looked like.) on its way to Ballenberg. This is billed as a “living history museum” – and that’s an accurate description.   It is a huge plot of land – I don’t have a way to describe how big it is, but it’s big – maybe Disneyland size. But don’t get the idea of neon and rides and selling things – not at all.   This is a natural environment where great care has been taken to maintain the trees and do farming and plant “typical” vegetables and fruits in gardens on the property. Houses and other buildings from all over Switzerland have been moved to Ballenberg and re-constructed. They are arranged in regions to represent the regions of Switzerland. A great effort...
Read more

Bern and Einstein (6/12)

I had coffee in my PJs and read the “paper” this morning – heaven! My host had a flight to Hamburg and back this morning, so I was alone in the apartment when I woke up. What a delight!   By the time I was showered and dressed, he was back from his flight. The weather looked crummy enough that I carried a raincoat, and went straight to Bern’s history museum, which also has a floor devoted to Albert Einstein, so I could be inside and away from the rain. I decided to start with the Einstein exhibit/museum, which was fascinating! A lot had been donated to the Bern exhibit by Israel – not clear whether it was the government or another museum. The exhibit detailed his life from his birth in Ulm, Germany, to his death in Princeton, New Jersey. The reason it’s in Bern is that Einstein came to Bern to live with another family when his parents moved to Milan after his father’s Munich business failed. He lived here, and did much of his “high school” and higher ed. here ...
Read more

Home (6/15)

I awoke before the alarm and got ready to go. After the standard hostel breakfast, I made my way to the airport. Things moved along in an orderly fashion, as is the case in Germany, and the plane left on time. It was a 3 ½ hour trip to Reykjavik. This time, we arrived in daylight, so I could see a bit of the terrain from the plane window. What I saw was flat and more brown than green – sort of like moonscape, with pools of water in various places. In the airport, there was very little time between planes for everyone on my flight. We had to go through passport control, and someone had arranged a crazy path of lines through the airport to contain the number of people all trying to get their passports stamped at the same time. One person tried to jump the line, and the “authorities” (who looked like teenage boys) set him straight. People were trying to catch flights to cities all over the U.S. and one or two other places, and WOW Air had delivered more than my plane...
Read more