Deutschland!

Sorry I haven't written in a while; Jonas, Keegan and I were in Germany last week! I didn't write anything about it before because I was surprising our friend Jeramy who is working in Spain this year.



We left our apartment at around 8:00 am for a 1:20 pm (Central time) flight that was three hours away (in Dallas). We had neither made the drive NOR been to the DFW airport before, so we figured we'd leave early. It's better to be safe than sorry! Wouldn't you be confused dealing with this?



After starting our trip off on a bad foot trying to figure out the 2,065 parking lots at the airport (exaggeration), we made it in good time for our flight. We started out with a two hour flight to Atlanta. We then had about a two hour layover until our flight to Stuttgart. We arrived in Stuttgart at 8:55 am (GMT+1 Germany), so we were pretty exhausted (Germany is seven hours ahead of our home in central time). Keegan was great for the flight, but we were all in need of a good nap.

The trip was very fun! I met a lot of people, including more of Jonas's family and his closest friends. Jonas and I went to Friedrichshafen for a day.. Jonas is now an OFFICIAL graduate of Zeppelin University and is a Bachelor of Art!! Woo hoo!!



All three of us got sick for some part of the trip. I was only sick for a day, Jonas was for about two, and Keegan was for about five. We think that there was a stomach bug going around because Jonas, Jeramy, Michael (Jonas's dad), Anja and her family, Martin (Jonas's friend), Theresa (Martin's gf), another family, plus more (and me) were all sick. Keegan probably just had jetlag.



So it was a good trip, but Jonas and I were ready to get back home and get back on our own schedule. Keegan was fussy most of the trip and couldn't keep anything down. The trip back was the worst traveling experience ever

We wake up at 6:50 am (Germany time) to catch our 10:50 am flight out of Stuttgart to Atlanta. We wanted to get there early so we could get the seat behind the wall for a bassinet for Keegan. It's over 10 hours of flying time...who wouldn't want that?? Well, we got it. The flight didn't end up leaving until about 11:40, and we knew that we only had a two hour layover in Atlanta. We were afraid that we were going to miss our flight because we had to go through customs and immigration, security, and recheck our bags.

Luckily, our flight arrived into Atlanta on time. We get to customs and immigration and the line seems to be pretty short. We look into the Non-Citizens line and there are people sitting on the floor. Huh?? When we get up to the front of the Citizens line, they tell us that there's a nationwide computer malfunction and they can only process U.S. Citizens or Greencard holders at that time. Shoot. Jonas is neither of those. I certainly wasn't going through without my husband, so we waited. And we waited. And we waited. It felt like years, but finally we got through with one of Jonas's government documents.



We only had a little less than an hour to get to our flight. We arrived in Terminal E, which you can find on the map above. Our flight was scheduled to leave out of Gate A32. 34 is the farthest gate from the train at each terminal. So we walked all the way down to find out that our gate was switched to E33, back where we came from and again, at the end of the terminal. We PLANNED on getting ice cream, but those plans were quickly destroyed when all our time was spent running from one end of the airport to the other.



We made our flight and everything, but we were already exhausted and frustrated. Oh, and did I mention that while going through security at the Atlanta airport Jonas broke his glasses? So we thought SURELY that would be the end of it. Nope. They lost our luggage. Perfect, huh? We crashed at the hotel and got our missing bag back in the morning.

Needless to say...Jonas and I are happy to be back home.