Sunday, April 18 Today is our 3 year “GOTCHA DAY” anniversary since we first got Cooper. Sure would love to see our kids. It has been such a blessing to hear how well they are doing without us being there. John and I eat breakfast at the hotel and take the shuttle back to the airport to check on our flight we have booked for Monday. We learn that NO flights are leaving on Monday and the earliest booking we can get out of Frankfurt is Friday. Don’t understand how a Monday departure turns into Friday when there are so many days in between. Seems like we’d get first dibs on flights since our initial flight out was scheduled 11AM last Friday, just hours after they closed the airport. The expressions on people’s faces are much different today than yesterday morning. People are getting weary. We run into our friend, David, who has been in Ghana. He’s modeling the free white t-shirt Lufthansa airlines handed out in their care packages. (John and I slept in ours last night). David’s been taking anti-malaria meds since he thinks he has malaria again and has had to ration them. He’s not feeling so well now. Our friend, John, from Botswana only brought $100 cash to get him to the US (and he has no credit cards). We’re able to help him out a bit since we can make a daily withdrawal from the ATM machine here. We met a woman today from San Francisco who lost her husband 4 years ago and is traveling for the first time since her husband’s death. She’s alone and is out of her Lexapro and Ambien. She begins to cry as she talks about losing her husband, ect. One guy who has been out of the country for the past year working with the US Secretary of State is supposed to get married in the states TODAY. We suggested to him that he do his wedding on skype and we could stand in as his bridal party. I can only imagine how many other stories are in the walls of the Frankfurt airport.
TOURING EUROPE IN 3 DAYS ….. We decide that we don’t want to sit around to find out there are further delays past Friday and so we book flights out of Madrid, Spain on Thursday morning to get us home Thursday night at 6:30pm. We can take a bus ride down to Madrid or rent a car. Since neither of us have ever been to Europe before, we choose to go for the scenic car route. We are able to retrieve our luggage (after an hour and a half wait), book a rental car for tomorrow morning (with GPS that I pray is in English), and head back to our hotel to drop the luggage off. We go back downtown to walk around (very crowded) and eat at a café in what must be their financial distract (thus a bull and bear bronze statue that looks like the in NYC).
We’re on day #4 in these same clothes, however, our suitcases are full of DIRTY clothes. What’s deodorant for anyway? Extra bummed now after Googling in Mapquest from Frankfort, Germany to Madrid, Spain. It’s an 18 HOUR drive. 6 hours of driving/day for 3 days isn’t what we had in mind to tour through Switzerland, France, and Spain. And that’s if we can do it without getting lost. This is killing John who is our ultra detailed planner when it comes to traveling. No planning on this trip, we’re just going for it. We’ve decided we’ll just crank up the music and look quickly as the scenery passes by. Honestly, I like experiencing new places, but I’m just as happy (if not much more so) hanging out and hearing people’s stories.
Thankful that I didn’t toss my clothing line out before we left Kazakhstan. We have our own clothesline with wet (and semi-clean) clothes now hanging up in our hotel room. Since we’re going to be in a different country for the next 3 days, no one will know if we’re in the same clothes each day anyway!