July 25th, 1998
| This was our last morning in Europe. We weren't very nostalgic though, because we had to get up at 4:15AM. We called down to the reception area so that they could call us a cab. We loaded into our cab at about 4:40AM. He drove like a madman. He went 90 MPH in 50 MPH zones and instead of driving in one of the 2 lanes that he had a choice of, he drove in the middle, on both lanes. Whenever we would come up on a car, he would get into the left lane to pass him and them go back to the middle. We definitely weren't late. We watched the meter that tells how much it is going to cost and it looked like we were going to make it with room to spare. When we got there, his meter said 36,000 lira. After he unloaded our luggage he said, "That will be 56,000 lira." I thought that I had not understood him correctly, so I gave him the 50,000 lira that we had. Sure enough, he asked again for the 56,000 lira. Luckily we had found that we actually had 70,000 lira total instead of the 50,000 that originally thought. I asked him why 56,000. He said that it is an extra 10,000 for picking us up, and an extra 10,000 for it being so early in the morning. How convenient. So we gave him 60,000 and were on our way. We looked for where we were supposed to check in our luggage and it appears that most of the airlines take down there signs at the end of the day, because there were a whole bunch of signs all over the luggage check-in counters. Our check-in went pretty much without incident. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| When we went to board our plane, we had to get on a bus that took all the passengers to the plane out on the runway. I never had to do that before. We also had to take the bus back to airport when we landed in Frankfurt, Germany. We had about a 1 hour layover in Frankfurt and then flew to Chicago. The Lufthansa planes didn't have the neat TVs on the backs of the seats. It was big plane. It was 747-400. It had 3 rows of seats seating 3-4-3 and it was a double-decker. We ended up sitting next to a chatty guy who ended up telling Jenny his life story. Jenny didn't seem to mind too much, though. It was great when we landed in Chicago and could actually read all of the signs and understand the language. We had a 3 hour layover there. We thought we might need some of that time for customs. But there wasn't much to it. So we sat around and waited. Our next flight was to Denver on a plane that was only 2 weeks old. We had a 1 hour layover in Denver. Well, we were supposed to have a 1 hour layover. After we boarded the plane, they determined that the weather was too rough to take off in. It was a thunder storm outside. It came on in a hurry, because when we landed everything was clear with no rain. We sat on the plane about an hour and half before we finally took off. We landed in Boise at 8:30PM Boise Time. It was 24 hours from the time we got up till the time we landed at Boise Airport. We were definitely beat. Andy, one of our friends, left our car there at the airport for us because he wasn't available to pick us up. It worked out nice, because we were so late that we would have felt bad if someone had to wait for us the whole time. We drove home, pet our cat a lot, and then I surveyed the garden. All looked well and we were ready to start our lives back to normal. |
 |
 |
 |