Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

As usual, I slept poorly before my flight. I was up well before my 5:45 AM alarm. Tinny came to meet me at breakfast, and our driver from yesterday came by at 7 and drove me to the airport with plenty of time to spare. I got to the boarding gate, the flight was called, and I got my boarding pass scanned and got on the boarding bus...

...and then we were told to get off of the boarding bus, because the plane wasn't ready after all. They announced that there'd be an hour delay. Then they removed the plane from the tarmac. After two hours they flew in another plane, and started prepping it.

I had a talk with the gate agent. She told me that with the plane scheduled to leave at 11:30, my connection (which had originally had a 3 hour layover) was still a legal connection. She told me "I think you'll make it, but you should run". The plane didn't leave until 12:00, though, which put me at the arrival gate at 1:35, with a 1:50 scheduled departure. I did run. Unfortunately, the gate was at a different section of the terminal, which required a tram trip and passing through security again. When I and the other two people racing to catch that Houston flight arrived, we were told that the flight was closed.

The Lufthansa service desk was helpful, but couldn't find a way to re-route me that didn't require me to stay overnight somewhere. Most of the flights across the Atlantic are in the morning, and the ones in the evening didn't have any connections that would get me to Austin.

So I'm spending the night in Frankfurt, at a hotel paid for by Air Croatia. After the early morning and stress of travel, I was tempted to stay in and relax. The hotel is fairly far from the touristic parts of the city, and it was raining. But chatting online with Adrienne convinced me that I should at least head into the center.

It was totally worth it. Frankfurt has a lot of skyscrapers and office buildings, but it has a charming reconstructed historic center as well. I strolled around buildings that had had their foundations laid roughly a thousand years ago.

Dinner was a pretzel with herbed cream cheese and bratwurst with sauerkraut, accompanied by the brewmaster's special edition of Paulaner hefeweizen. Yum. After dinner, I wandered across the Main river to Alt-Sachsenhausen, known for its apple cider, which turned out to be a bit drier than I prefer. The mixed berry compote with vanilla sauce that I had with it was amazing though.

I'm in my hotel's bar now, watching Germany dismantle Brazil in the world cup. Some of the Germans are starting to root for Brazil scoring a goal or two, the rout is so bad.