We're here

Yesterday certainly was a long one. Actually, I'll start with our arrival at BWI airport on Friday evening. We left the house around 4:45 or so and took a taxi to the airport. I called the cab company twice. That's because after I called the first time, we got a phone call at about ten minutes later with a recorded voice stating "your taxi has arrived." Unless we were being taken to the airport in Wonder Woman's invisible airplane or some other means of transparent conveyence, that wasn't true. No cab. We waited another ten minutes or so and I called back. I mentioned "uh, we got a call that our cab was here. He's not." The woman on the other end said "I'll send him back." I was going to say "how can you send him back, he was never here in the first place," but the phone went dead before I had a chance.

Well, a cab did indeed show up about 5 minutes after that call. We packed our bags in the trunk, and we were off - almost. Just as we were pulling away, a second cab showed up in front of the house. The driver rolled his window down and started swearing at the first cabbie in some language I never heard. I assume it was swearing, at least. The second driver also parked in a way that seemed designed to prevent us from leaving. I think he was pissed about missing out on the cab fare.

Our driver maneuvered around the second (first?) cab, and we were off. Our vacation had offically begun.

We got to BWI with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately, the plane did not. We left BWI about an hour late, and arrived in Iceland about an hour late as well. At least they held the connection - especially since 80% of the plane was full of soccer fans, the vast majority of them US supporters. That was pretty cool.

We got to Frankfurt, of course, an hour late, and after we grabbed our checked bags we found Mark and Caroline.

We went to the Hertz counter to pick up our rental, grabbed some cash at the ATM then went downstairs to try to find the car. That was fun, since the guy at the Hertz counter told us the car would be in "space number 2." Not quite. After looking around for about 15 minutes we found it in space number 30 something.

The drive to Cologne was pretty uneventful. We stopped by our place first to pick up our keys, brought our bags in, then I drove Mark and Caroline to their hotel while Jan stayed at the apt and got some rest.

I did a little grocery shopping, got back to the apartment a bit later. We called the others in our group who got to Cologne yesterday - Rob, Marcel, Jay, Dana and Ted, and told them we'd try to meet them that night for drinks. That was not to be. Instead we ran into a nice couple from North Carolina, Bill and Julie, who walked with us to a nearby Imbiss where we had a decent meal. Then Jan and I headed back to the apartment and went to bed around 10:00.