The most amazing adventure x10....Day 1

The vacation began on Saturday, May 21st at 6:30pm.....when our plane took off for it's 10 hour journey east to Frankfurt, Germany.

We got to the airport in plenty of time and snapped a few pictures (because we were so excited to get it started).

 Had to take a picture of our Euro's.  Got to make sure you have the right money to spend.

Trying to take a selfie with the plane we were going to fly on, but the light was not in our favor.  However.......can you see the excitement in our faces!

Here is the plane that we are going to eat, fly, and sleep in for the next 10 hours.

Our first picture taken in Germany.  This was the airport.  It actually was kind of a scary feeling not knowing where we needed to go, the signs were in German, and people weren't speaking our language.  After clearing customs, we found a taxi stand and were off to our hotel.  That is.....we picked a taxi driver who was Mario Andretti.  This little old guy shouldn't have been driving as fast as he was, but they sure do drive fast on those German highways!

We got to the hotel about 1pm German time and we were exhausted.  Hard to get a good night sleep and it was actually 6am Houston time, so we had been up for almost 24 hours with very little sleep.  We got our room and crashed for 2 hours.....we needed the sleep.

Here's the first picture I took from our hotel room.  It's the train station that was right across the street.  This train station is the biggest station in Europe.  You could take a train anywhere in Europe from this station.  Now it was time to explore: 
 

 

These were pictures that we took inside of the train station:

I have to admit it was a little overwhelming that first day, but once you got the hang of things.....it was very easy to figure things out.  Also, thank goodness that they had an EXCELLENT customer service area at this station that was very helpful in helping you figure things out and get the right train tracks and tickets.

We spent the rest of our first day just wandering around our hotel checking out what was nearby. 

This is the front of the train station. 

This was a picture of our hotel from the front of the train station.  We stayed at the Steigenberger Hotel.  You can see how amazingly close this was to the station. 

Another view out the window of our hotel.  I loved that we could open the windows and let in all the fresh air (and noise)

The other thing we loved about our recent trip was the fact that it got dark so late.  This picture was taken at about 9:30 at night......we had our first German meal on the patio of this restaurant:  Weinerschnitzel and sausages.   It was so delicious. 
Yay.....thankfully Coca Cola was universal.  Paul was much more adventurous and drank German beer.  We were tired.....so it was off to bed after this.

Not much time to spend in Germany and we had a big day planned for tomorrow.