We are back! It's kind of surreal in a way to be back home. The house is almost exactly as we left it. It's almost like we never left...
As I type, Jenn is sleeping. The last thing I remember is Jenn and I getting back from dinner around 5pm and I went downstairs to pet Kona. The next thing I know it is 11:00 and dark outside. Whoa, I must have been tired. After waking up in a strange hotel over the past 3 weeks, it was just as strange to wake up in our own basement...
Today was a very long day. Long long long. We had a 7am flight from Amsterdam to Frankfurt. Ugh. That meant waking up at 4am (Amsterdam time or 7pm Portland time the previous evening...). We left the hotel around 5am and took a Taxi (unmarked BMW) to Schiphol (pronounced skip-pool) airport.
We get to the airport and there is this huge line. I mean, it's 5am people!!! Oh well, we finally get to the ticket counter and the woman gives us our boarding pass and tells us that since we want to check our backpack, we will have to wait with them for over an hour and a half because the conveyor belt isn't working. Huh? Apparently if we had regular suitcases we could leave them with her, but because we have a bunch of straps and the conveyor belt isn't working... What? What is worse is the line to get through security looks very long indeed and if we did wait over an hour with our backpacks, because the conveyor belt wasn't working, we never would have made it through security to catch our flight. Finally, we decide to do as she asked and went over to the place to wait with our backpacks (because the conveyor belt didn't work...) but was met with a kind woman from another airline who said we could just leave our bags with her. We decided to take her word for it, because we never would have made it through security otherwise. I had a funny feeling that we would never see those packs again, but we went with it.
It was a quick flight over to Frankfurt. The only problem is that we had a 5 hour layover. Ugh. Not enough time to take a taxi into town and see Frankfurt. So, it's holiday in Frankfurt airport. Since we didn't get that much sleep, the goal was to just find a quiet place to rest our heads. We get in the long line to go through yet another security check. Funny thing, there are huge signs everywhere in this wing of the airport stating that they must subject you to all of these extra checks because the American government says we have to. But, when we finally get to the check point, the guy looks at our tickets and says "Portland? No." What?!? Was the flight canceled? Does he just have a thing against Portland? Then he finally says that we cannot enter the security area more than 2 hours before our flight. Ugh...
So, we head back to the main part of the airport, which has virtually no seating outside the restaurants, and an even smaller amount of seating marked 'no smoking'. Jenn spots a bench in the nonsmoking eating area and we crash. At this point I'm so sleepy that I just put my head on the table in front of the bench and quickly fall asleep. I'm awakened by the sound of two Americans yelling "hey, that's Andre Agassi. Is that him? Yes, that Agassi!" I never got a good look at him, but Jenn later confirmed that she did in fact see Agassi with a small child an another unknown woman who was not Steffi Graft.
finally 11am local time comes around and we go back through security and head for our gate. Jenn has her camera in her back, but I was carrying mine in my pocket. So, I surrender it to the security people before going through the metal detector. On the other side I am told there is an extra check for the camera. I'm taking to another station where the seem to examine my camera with what looks like a hair blowdryer. So, I have to ask what they are doing. I'm told they are checking my camera for explosives. Oh. Apparently my camera isn't a bomb and I'm given it back. We eventually find our gate and crash in some small chairs. There are some longer benches here that would have been great to sleep on if they had let us through before, but then Jenn wouldn't have seen a famous tennis star...
Then, just before boarding, we are asked to leave the boarding area. Huh? We collect our stuff and head out. Then, one by one, they check our tickets and let us sit in the boarding area again. They is just more of the same strangeness. It is nearly time to leave and both Jenn and I noticed that there is no plane to board... But, we are hustled down the ramp, then down some stairs to the tarmac to some buses, which eventually takes us to our plane.
The flight from Frankfurt to Portland takes 10 hours. *sigh* Still we managed. What surprises me is that the Portland/Frankfurt flights both way are completely full. And, it was a pretty big plane too. It was no 474, but it was one of the larger Airbus (A360-300, if I remember correctly), which seats 2,4,2 in econo-class. The plane held well over 200 people, maybe even 300.
We waited and waited and waited for our packs to arrive at the carosel. But, finally there they were. Yippee! :-) Jenn's mom Linda was outside and took us home. Like I said before, things are a little blurry for me after that. We had dinner, then came home. We had been awake for nearly 24 hours, except for brief naps in the airport and on the plane. Next thing I know I'm waking up at 11pm in our basement... :-)
Anyway, it is good to be come. We had a great trip. Now we just need to get our sleeping schedule back to normal. Luckily, we have a 3 day weekend to work on it.
We'll both probably start uploading pictures to Flickr tomorrow...
