Last leg -- Frankfurt - Dallas - Seattle - Port Orchard

We have not had good wifi connections lately, and we have been very busy.  We went to Dresdan for 2 days, then to Berlin for 2 days, and the travel days in between are quite grueling (since we lost the EuRail Pass, so we have to travel the puddle-jumper Regio lines).  We are now in Frankfurt.  It took 4 trains and 6.5 hours for a trip that would have been 2.5 hours straight on the ICE.  Also, we are traveling 2nd class, which is much more tiring than the 1st class of the Pass.  I'll see if I can put posts on about Dresden & Berlin and past-date them.  

Now we are in Frankfurt, our jumping off place for the long trip home.  We wanted to rest up for it because in addition to the 12+ hours of flying, there is a 6-hour wait in the Dallas airport.  So we planned 2 nights here, to avoid that "check-in at 7 pm, sleep, check-out at 6 am, head for endless flight" rush/hassel.  

Right now, I am kinda stunned.  We thought Murphy's Law had decided to leave us alone, but it has struck again.  Our reservations here in Frankfurt were mistakenly made for May 19 instead of June 19.  We didn't know it until we went to check in.  And we hit town when "there is a fair on, all rooms are booked."  I presume it's some sort of trade fair, since Frankfurt is the financial capital of Europe.  We ended up getting rooms we don't like for horrendous prices ($250 more than our booking price).
Note to self:  always check reservations at the next stop before leaving any place.  We could have stayed one more night in Berlin and saved one of these expensive nights.

We are just across the street from the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof -- the central train station -- this photo is taken from our balcony.  P.S.  I love Photo Stream.  We take photos on my iPod and Manfred's iPad, and they are here on the computer, ready to put into blogs and such.  

This Good Bad is Beautiful

"Bad" is German for "bath" as in thermal or mineral baths from hot springs.  This is thermal activity area, and there is a really nice spa in the nearest town, Lenti, 16 km from here.  It is also a conflux of earth energy lines.  

Today we went to it, the Lenti Thermal Baths and St George Energy Park.  What a day.  We came at 9 am and spent most of the day in warm and hot baths and relaxing in the oh-so-comfy lounge chairs.  We also had a nice lunch there, sitting in our swimming suits.  It cost us US$8.50 each, for the whole day, + $4.75 each for lunch.   Click the link to see more.  

Yesterday I had a riding lesson.  The horse was good, the teacher was good, I was not too terrible, much better than last time, but was very stiff after.  But the baths took care of that.  

It makes up for not getting Manfred or Bill to go to a Bad in Budapest.

Staying longer

This time-share exchange condo is such a good place to rest up.  We will be staying on here until Wednesday, June 13, when we will drive to Budapest, turn in the car, and take a train to Dresden.  We were supposed to go to Prague for 5 nights, but we are skipping that because Manfred has fallen in love with this spot.  It really is quite unbelievable.  It's called the Abbazia Country Club  There are no engine or motor noises to be heard, day or night, just birds and occasional cat, dog or horse.

Last night there was a spectacular lightening storm, with lots of rain, so the weather is still cool.

I finally got the Hungarian maps downloaded to our TomTom GPS.  It took about 4 hours.  I don't know if it's because the connection here is slow, or it just takes that long.  I had purchased them, but the All Europe is only loaded in sections, and our previous section did not include Hungary.  So I had to remove the "Southern Europe" from the GPS to the computer, then download "Eastern Europe" from TomTom to the computer, then only download it to the GPS.  The files are over 1 GB.  If I had done this before, we would have saved 5 hours of driving around in the dark.  : (

I have another riding session today.  I'm so out of shape.  I hope I don't get the same lazy horse I rode the last time.

All is lost

I haven't written for so long, because we have been hoping to get Manfred's bag back. We assumed that it had been turned into lost & found, but we had to wait out a long weekend and then 3 more days to find out that it had not been turned in. Then we had to start the process of replacing passport and credit cards. Eurail Pass is not replaceable, we had used only 20% of the $2000 ticket (for 3 people).

We went on to Budapest, and had a very nice stay there, at least for me. Manfred was not feeling very good about anything. We had to stay extra days because the Canadian Embassy was putting up lots of hoops to jump thru for getting a temp passport.

Part of our arrangement was to stay in a time-share condo in the Hungarian countryside. We had it booked for a week, had planned to use 6 days, but 3 of those days were already gone. We rented a car, assuming that our GPS maps for "all Europe" would work, only to find that Hungary was blank. It took us 8 hours to make a 3-hr drive to this remote place, but it's very nice. Manfred wants to stay here longer and skip Prague, and even Dresden. There's nothing to do or see here, but eat and swim, which suits him fine. I hope he'll be bored with it in time for us to go to Dresden.

Sitting on the verandah in front of our apartment, I took a photo on my iPod, here it is.