It’s 5am and I’ve been laying awake since 3:30, so I’ve gone downstairs to the terrace. Good thing I brought my room key (real turn key) because the exit doors were deadbolted and could get out without a key. The keys are fancy, with grooves and notches cut into the side of the key.

Anyway, its probably in the low 40s (F) and clear skies, and I’m listening to the stream running along the road and tracks in the valley below the hotel. It smells like cut grass and cows, which makes perfect sense as we’ve seen a lot of both in this valley so far. Ebenalp is the star Mountain at the end of this culdesac valley, and it looked pretty impressive when we drove to the end of the road yesterday. That’s just another mile or so away from the Hotel Alpenblick in Schwende.

So onto the journey. The long flight to Frankfurt was fine, though I feared otherwise when we got on the plane and it was half full of GIs (young ones) who were all air bridging to Germany and onwards probably. They pretty much occupied the entire middle seat section of the plane for about 20 rows plus some on either side. It was like being on a high school bus at first they were all carrying on, etc. I thought this is going to be hell, but they actually quieted down and it wasnt that bad.

Too bad pretty much no one could sleep past the first little nap or so. As the hours went by more and more people just gave up, so it was like dominoes. Didn’t help there was a group of German ladies who never tried to sleep and just carried on laughing, etc a few rows up. So it was no keep pretty much for me.

Then in Frankfurt we had near disaster as we almost missed our flight. We weren’t given a boarding pass for the connection into Zurich when we checked into Dallas. I didn’t think much of it, figuring we’d just go to the gate and they would print one for us upon arrival. Unfortunately I didn’t count on a few things:

Frankfurt airport is a confusing crowded mess, with terrible signage.
They make you go through customs, passport control, and security again, hard to do without a boarding pass.
When we finally got to the Lufthansa service counter, the agent printed two copies of my boarding pass and none for Holly. Fun.

So initially we just tried going to A terminal on the train, and there were two stops one for ABC and the last for just A. So we tried the latter and there was a mob trying to get through customs. So back on the train and to the middle stop, and wandering around trying to figure out the signs, which were misleading a couple times, and through massive throngs of people. We made it to the service counter just becoming aware it was getting late and go two boarding passes.

Made it back to the security check quite a ways away and realized the mistake with the names. Security said “you shall not pass” and so we panicked and spotted a first class service desk where a very nice woman scrambled to help. She said it was too late and the computer would not let her check us in, so she took us straight to the front of security and tried to convince them to let us through with no luck. She was pretty miffed at that, so she ran back to her computer and printed off our reservation or something unintelligible and then we got through. Wish I could thank her again.

Oh yeah somewhere in there we made it through passport control even with the missing pass… It’s all a blur now.

We ran to the gate and they were waiting for us, as the nice agent had first called them to inform.

So we made it and all was well. We got to Zurich where they surprisingly didn’t check passports, not sure must be an EU thing. Then we got to Hertz who were very nice, but didn’t have our reservation. Long story short, I had made it for the wrong date, using out departure instead of arrival date. Thankfully despite turning other people away who were looking for cars, they gave us one anyway. I guess our rate was good enough for them or they were just nice I think.

They gave us a pretty big crossover type called Ford Kuga… diesel manual. Maybe nobody else wanted it, it’s pretty big.

My fingers are frozen now, and it’s getting light so that’s all for now. Bells striking 6 down below.