Getting to Germany

 One Thursday morning, my Lovely Bride and I packed up and headed to Bush Intercontinental and embarked on an adventure with Sister Kaye and Brother-in-law Michael.  Our last venture overseas had been a rather free-form and unorganized time spent wandering the northern part of Italy.  Sister K kept extolling the wonders of programmed tours, and so we decided to introduce some order into our lives and try a river cruise down the Danube to Vienna. In December.  I know...this doesn't sound like a rational thing for sun loving, life-long Texans to jump into.  But as has happened frequently in our married lives, desires to shop in every Christmas Market in southern Germany and Austria overcame reason and rational thought.


 And so it came to pass that we delivered ourselves into the hands of TSA for some pre-flight processing.  We had heard there were many recent changes to the established security protocols which meant more thorough and invasive examinations of our bags and bodies could be expected.  Gratefully, such was not the case.  I'm not sure why, but when we underwent our scrutinization, TSA's main interest was the speed in which passengers were completing the process.  It took longer to repack carryon bags and get re-dressed than to be examined.

Sister Kaye waiting for our flight.



The initial flight out of Houston was delayed by an hour, and so our subsequent connection from Amsterdam to Munich was also changed.  Fortunately, the trans-Atlantic flight wasn't full, so we were able to spread out a bit and have a little extra room.  Arriving at Schipol just after dawn, we discovered Europe was enveloped in a grey miasma of fog, rain and snow.  And so we sat for four or five hours, watching Holland drip. 

By this time, the combination of no sleep and crossing too many time zones too rapidly started to take its toll.