I'm back

I'm back. More on the immense experience of the travels back to Michigan, which took approxiamately 34 hours! Especially enjoyable was the obnoxious, rude, ignorant tattoed man from LA everyone had to deal with (not that I have any opinion on him!). But I made it back...

Okay, back with the details (if you care) of the trip back! After seeing Trace and Stephanie off at their train to Munich (Muchen), I went to my platform to wait the 20 minutes for mine. A minor panic when the board changed to Munich and I ran downstairs to check a monitor, but I got on the train and rode back to Amsterdam. When I got there I had forgotten how to get to the tram to get me to airport - I now knew about getting the ticket and had plenty of change. After wandering around all of the sudden I was back out in front of the station. I finally just found a train to get me there. I knew I was cutting it close for an international flight, but got to the airport still with just over an hour and a half to go.

The nice lady at the desk gave me my boarding pass and told me to get in line quickly because it was long for passports. Luckily I went through that pretty quickly, got my carryon checked and then got aboard - in the last row, no window seat. It was okay, really, considering I'm not too keen on flying low distances. We were 20 minutes out of the Cincinnati airport (this would be almost 9 hours later) when the captain came on and said they were having weather and would have to circle around. Which they did three times. Then we started getting low on gas, so we had to land at the Columbus airport. We gassed up and waited. They would keep saying they closed the airport, then opened it, we'd get ready and then they would close it again. It was about this time that the mildly annoying tattooed guy in my row started turning into the obnoxious, rude, ignorant tattoed man from LA. Every other word he swore and then kicked things a couple of times. He started raising his voice and I wondered if it was going to be like those two drunk sisters who got arrested a few years ago. We stayed in Columbus for FIVE hours. Everything was locked (no food, no drink) for customs and we couldn't get of there because we were an international flight. So, we went on the 25 minute bumpy ride to Cincinnati finally and had to go through customs, had to get our bags and had to follow the confused airport people. I missed my flight by 15 minutes (I had a 5 hour layover). Then they ran out of hotels (I wasn't going to get one anyway) and had planned to put me on a flight for Sunday morning (two nights and a day later) - by 1:00 a.m. or so things had calmed down. I slept - kind of - in the airport with about 100+ others and got in line at 5 a.m. and got placed on standby and waited until 8:35 a.m. to get on the flight to Grand Rapids. But I'm back...and very tired.

Where I slept in the Cincinnati airport, trying to get a flight back (with extra bag for Trace and Stephanie's things)!!!