There was a whole potato on that stick five minutes before I snapped these pictures. I hope this wasn’t the best part of Sara and Luke’s visit to our town/region, but then again, she seemed pretty happy with that potato, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Or maybe the comfort-food aspect made all the trials and tribulations of the travel over here seem survivable.
Weather at the first stop on their flight itinerary prevented them from taking off on the day of departure — but only after having spent seven hours in the plane waiting for clearance and runway traffic jams to clear up. 350 flights were cancelled that evening, but Sara and Luke were lucky to have relatives in the area with whom they could spend the night and try again the next day. The next day, they did manage to get on a flight, but it too was delayed for three hours, risking a missed connection in London on their way to Munich (final destination for the first leg of their trip to Europe).
When they finally stepped through the immigration security barrier at Terminal Two in Munich, they were exhausted and dismayed to find they would be wearing the clothes they came in for at least a few more days — somewhere between their last stop in the U.S. and their arrival in Munich both of their bags got lost. Or at least delayed.
In the end, both of their bags were finally delivered to our apartment in Regensburg, but we were never sure when that would be. Sara and Luke called the airline(s) every day trying to get an estimate of when their bags would show up, because waiting around here for them was not part of the plan. So we ended spending a lot more time in Regensburg, waiting for the magical phone call with their luggage drop-off window, hanging out at the Bürgerfest. Which, by the way, was a lot of fun this year despite the weather. It was nice to see Tammy and Sarah cut loose in front of a ska-punk band shell down by the Weenie Shack.*
Maybe that downtime was for the best, since they had a very heavy itinerary — two stops in Spain and a few days in London — after their short visit to Regensburg. We sure enjoyed having them.
