Deustchland 2008: How we got here

In only a few days, we jumped and booked our tickets to Germany for December...but it did take quite some time to get to this two week vacation and fate just needed to nudge a few last details. Last year, when I was in Utah, I talked about returning with their petsitting help sometime in the future. We were at dinner at Market Street Broiler; the meal and atmosphere was fabulous and represented the genesis of the entire idea. They were on board...then, we bought the second rental house, we furnished, added a shed, bought a lawnmower, all of those frills of domestic and thirtysomething bliss. (OK, unfair, since Ryan is still 29...but he'll freely admit he's 29 going on 39 when it comes to his level of responsibility in finance and around the house.)

So, no return was planned. I even wrote about being sad about this.

Last weekend, Ryan traveled to Salt Lake City for a wedding; his dad mentioned it and planted the seed -- why don't we come for Thanksgiving and then you can head off to Germany for a while? -- are you kidding me? -- no, let's plan it. So, a week later, we did and we're ready to go.

Of course, we are using Skymiles - that's the only reason we favor our AMEX. Since our last trip, we've placed everything we can on that card...including expenses for Ryan's salon. Just a few days ago, we hit 192,000 miles...enough for 2 first-class tickets to Europe. Being so close to December, I was worried that seats wouldn't be available and they were certainly sparse. The Delta website looks and feels like it's working for you, but it's utterly frustrating, it changes by the moment, and when a majority of SkySaver seats are on partner airlines that you can't book online...it sucks. So I paid the $50 fee per person to talk to a human and in 40 minutes we had it worked out.

You can't hold tickets over the phone (which is damn stupid because you can do that online - for free - but here I'm paying someone and they won't?) so I had to put her on hold, call Ryan, get the ok, and we booked it. Done. Das Ende.

Why fly into Milan and out of Amsterdam? It's all they had. Back in 2006, our Delta agent could only get us into Stuttgart and out of Düsseldorf...fate meant for it to happen. We wouldn't have met our favorite city Stuttgart, we wouldn't have drank altebier in Düsseldorf, and we would have only been there 10 days since that was the original plan.

So, speaking of plans, we chatted extensively and excitedly last night on the porch (cooler weather finally, rain) and one possibly route would be Milan, then Zürich (expensive), dann München, und Nürnberg, mit Stuttgart, danach Amsterdam. A little city-focused, but with it being the winter it's more reliable.

Wow...viel spaß, wir machen es sehr interessant. Wir sind am Einkaufen interessieren...mit Sights dass wir letztes Zeit nicht gesehen haben. Und ich hoffe, dass mein Deutsch besser über letztes Zeit sein werden. Wow, wann ich mehr Komplexsatz geschreibt habe, dann ich besser bin muß! (Or is the fact that I screwed up my own self-praise something to be worried about?)

Rick Steves, here we come!

Tschüß!