Pre-Vacation and Day 1 of Vacation in Germany

I will start with the Saturday before we left (we left on a Monday).  I was woken up by my cell phone ringing, and it was a recording from Delta... "Your flight from Atlanta to Munich has been cancelled.  Please go online or call 1-800-xxx-xxxx to rebook your flight."  Umm, excuse me, what?!  I immediately ran to the computer freaking out (being snippy with Matt because he was asking me what was wrong, as if it was his fault), pulled up our reservation and it had a handy-dandy button to rebook your flight.  If only it was that easy, because so many people were trying to rebook their flight the seats were filling up faster than the website could figure out what was going on.  I ended up calling the 800 number in order to talk to a person (of course that felt like it took FOREVER).  We ended up rebooking our flight (originally supposed to get in to Munich around 7:30 am local time) and we had to make an extra stop AND didn't get in until almost 3:00 pm local time.  Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed at that point.  The woman on the phone told me that they cancelled the flight due to weather... weather?  2 days early?  Well, little did I know they were predicting ice and snow storms in Atlanta.  So, the proactive cancelling of our flight ended up being to our benefit... at least we didn't get stuck in Atlanta, as I don't think any (or many) flights left that airport all of last week!

We left home and flew into New York City-Kennedy airport.  I did not like the set-up of this airport, but we eventually figured out where we were supposed to catch our next flight!  Our flight from there to Amsterdam was on a plane that had a second floor.  I guess it was the plane just smaller than the Airbus.  Our flight was FULL and about 6-7 hours long, but it was overnight so we were able to sleep  (or at least I did).  Here's a picture I took when we had just gotten off in Amsterdam:

We spent a little bit of time in the Amsterdam airport, but only had about 2 hours to get through passport control and to our next gate.  Our next flight into Munich was only about 2 hours and it was an easy flight compared to the one going across the pond.  Once we landed in Munich we actually didn't have to go through customs or passport control because we had already landed in the European Union previous to arriving in Germany.  My younger brother met us at the airport to help us get to our hotel... he even made a sign welcoming us to Germany (on an 8 1/2" x 11" pieces of paper using a sharpie, haha!).  Thank goodness he met us, because the train/metro system in Munich was CONFUSING at first.  We definitely got the hang of it by the end of the week.  Here are Matt & I on the S-bahn (subway/train system that reaches the suburbs of Munich):

We both look pretty exhausted from traveling for about 24 hours, but its still a cute picture!

It took about an hour to get from the airport to the hotel so we didn't get there until closer to 5 p.m.  After checking in, we decided to power-through the rest of the evening by going to see my brother's apartment and going to dinner!  Of course we had to have some German beer with our dinner (much more cost effective then pop or water, more fluid ounces per Euro).  Here are the first beers we tried:

I had a Helles (bright/light colored) and Matt had a Weissbier Dunkel (dark wheat beer) at the Italian restaurant near my brother's university campus.

We made it back to our hotel all by ourselves that night, ok my brother got us to the place where we had to switch trains but we took it from there!  Here's a picture of our adorable hotel that night:

Its kind of blurry, sorry!

We definitely crashed in bed that night, but not before Skyping with our baby boy!  I'm so thankful that my parents and my in-laws made the effort to Skype with us each evening during our trip... it definitely helped me not go crazy missing Jack!