Europe Trip: Getting Around

We started from Dulles Airport on Friday, June 25, with two very excited kids.  The first of their surprises for the trip came up when they were standing in line to check in; they realized they weren't standing in the "regular" line.  We then got to explain to them that, thanks to the abundance of miles, we were instead flying to Europe in business class.  When we boarded the flight and found our seats, with their 55-inch pitch, Sarah exclaimed, "Look at all the ROOM!"

Both flights went very well, and on both, everyone except Sarah got some sleep.  She was so excited, even on the night flight across, that she didn't get much sleep, if any...she was watching the movies and enjoying her first intercontinental flight.  On arrival in Frankfurt, we cleared customs and then went to the Admirals Club to take showers and get changed for the day, before heading to the train station located at the airport.  We rode a high-speed ICE train up to Berlin, and enjoyed having a compartment to ourselves to nap.  (Daddy woke from a nap in a panic, thinking we had missed our stop...silly Daddy...)

Our trains passed through beautiful, largely flat, countryside, and I have never seen so many wind farms; the Germans have that down very well.  But for a country of so many millions of people, they certainly route their trains in such a way as to leave the impression that it's nothing but farms and forest.

We took a train to Dortmund on Monday, then rented a car for the next four days.  In America, we rent Fords.  In Germany, they gave me a Mercedes C-class.  I had the rush of driving on the autobahn, which gave me three lasting memories: One, getting the car up to 205kph (about 130mph) on one stretch of road; two, legally and without consequence passing a police car in the other lane at around 100mph (try doing that in Virginia); and three, similarly, blowing past a candy-apple-red Ferrari that was also in the slow lane (hey, if you're not gonna use it...).

After turning in the car, on Friday the 2nd we took another ICE train to Stuttgart, then connected to a French TGV train.  The TGV was in a book of trains that David LOVED when he was a toddler, so it was really cool to be able to share that experience with him.  Of all the trains, that was the one we were most glad we had reserved 1st-class tickets in: the cars were stuffed with people heading to Paris for the weekend, so much so that some people were sitting on the floor in the vestibules of the cars.

Our flight home was fine, although a little late getting back to Dulles; on the little TVs we could see the flight path as air traffic control routed us up over Cape Cod, north of Boston into southern NH, and only then south towards DC.  Hey, we didn't mind a little more luxurious rest in the business-class seats before coming home to a 100-degree summer's day in Washington....

Our Vacation to Europe

We have just returned from our 11-day amazing, exciting, insightful, and just-plain-fun visit to Germany and France, and with a couple of days around the house to do laundry, pick up the mail, and run errands, I've had a chance to get the photos uploaded and will now begin blogging about the trip.

I've decided to do something a little different, though.  Rather than blog chronologically, with (for example) an entry for each day, I've grouped the photos and blog entries into five themes that ran through the trip.  We had the fun of getting there and Getting Around, and of course one of the major themes of the trip was visiting the cities the Kleppinger family hails from, so seeing Where We Come From was important.  But we were also very much tourists, and spend a day and change Exploring Berlin, then a couple of days in the middle of the trip just being Tourists in Germany and seeing famous sites, before heading to Paris and transforming into Tourists in Paris for the rest of the trip.

I'll do an entry on each of those topics, then, with stories on each of the themes, and you can click on the respective photo albums to see some of the highlights visually.  We look forward to hearing your comments on each.