Leaving for Germany

At the beginning of this year, we made a resolution to take each of our four grandsons on an international trip of their choosing after completing sixth grade. Peter, now eleven years old, wanted to go to Germany with us. Since we have been here several times before, this was a good choice for us as well. Mary contacted the travel agent at to.europe.com and arranged a week, mostly in Bavaria but a few days in Berlin. This travel agency Mary uses, to-europe.com, always reserves excellent hotels near attractions and provides tickets to all sites in the area and passes for trains, subways and buses. Their prices are very reasonable and cheaper than we could arrange on our own. All the hotels they have booked for us on any of our trips are historic and offer large, elegant buffet breakfast included in our lodging.

After exercising at Planet Fitness, we loaded our bags in the car and left home at 9 am to the Hilton near the Cincinnati airport in Covington, Kentucky. We each had a personal item for the flight. Mary had a small carry on, and we shared a small duffel bag as a checked bag. We have used OneStopParking.com on several prior occasions and found it to be about half the price of parking at the airport’s long-term parking. It took only about 5 minutes for the driver to take us to the drop off point at the airport. The Koehler family arrived to drop Peter off at 11 am and stayed until we checked in and had cleared the travel of a minor with a non-custodial parent. There was no problem, so we said our goodbyes to Greg, Sarah and Nicholas before going through security and all three of us had TSA PreCheck.

We had learned earlier that our flight to Detroit would be departing later than scheduled, making us unable to get on the connecting flight from Detroit to Munich. It wasn’t a problem for Delta to schedule us to go to Atlanta then to Munich arriving only a little later than our flight from Detroit. Until our flight, scheduled for 1 pm boarded, we walked around the Cincinnati airport and sometimes sat in the terminal to chat. The aircraft boarded only slightly later than scheduled but we would have time to make our connection from Atlanta to Munich. The gate agent offered to gate-check our carry-on bags through to Munich which was fine with us so we wouldn’t have to carry the bags through the Atlanta airport.

After everyone was boarded, the airplane taxied out and started down the runway gaining speed almost to liftoff when the pilot quickly decelerated and stopped on the runway. The captain came on the address system to inform us that an error light showed up regarding a door that wasn’t properly latching. He said that a maintenance crew was on the way to assess the problem. After sitting on the tarmac for over 90 minutes, the captain informed the passengers that we would return to the gate for the main maintenance team to assess. After another 30 minutes, we were informed that another aircraft would have to be brought in and that we would arrive in Atlanta much too late for our flight to Munich. The earliest we could arrive in Munich would be late on Monday.

Peter found Bob Ross's Little Trees mints

Shortly after we deplaned, we received a message from Delta that we could be transferred to a British Airways flight taking us to Heathrow in London then to Munich by midafternoon on Monday. We only had to accept this change. That was the problem. Since we didn’t have an account with British Airways, we couldn’t confirm the changes online. Mary had no success contacting customer support by telephone. Since British Airways has one flight each day out of CVG, their team only arrived three hours before the scheduled flight. Our flight was scheduled for 9 pm so we planned to meet the gate agent at 6 pm. Problem was that the agents were at the arrivals desk at that time which was outside of security. Mary left her things with Peter and I then left the secure area and walked to the only British Airways desk where she was able to not only confirm the flight but get seat assignments for us to Heathrow and on to Munich. The seats would not be together for the seven-hour flight to London but we had seats booked. Peter and I would need to take our passports to the agent at the gate before boarding. The agent at the gate told us that our checked bag and gate checked bags would be brought over to our flight through Heathrow.

We were relieved to have the flights worked out and went to dinner at Blaze Pizza in the airport. Each of us had a twelve-dollar meal voucher from Delta but the clerk at Blaze Pizza couldn’t figure out how to use more than one voucher so we paid part of the bill on our Visa card. Peter had a pizza with only sauce with no meat, vegetables, meat or even cheese. I had a four-meat pizza. Mary had some of each of our pizzas. Since we had two $12 vouchers left, we got ice cream from Graeter’s for Mary and I and a doughnut from Dunkin’ for Peter. We used leftover voucher money to buy bagged snacks for Peter from a newsstand.

Our flight to London boarded on time. Mary was seated in aisle 32 while Peter and I were in aisle 34 but a few seats apart. A student from Miami Ohio traded seats with me so Peter and I could sit together. A meal was served on the flight but neither of us was hungry. By 10:30 the crew had gathered the trash from the meal and the captain dimmed the lights. We got under the blankets and tried to sleep. Peter flopped a lot trying to get comfortable and eventually fell asleep.

We didn't get a chance to celebrate Mary's birthday but she considered this trip with Peter a great birthday present.