It's late in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It took a herculean effort and patient navigation skills to find our way through three airports and three train stations to reach this beautiful medieval walled town. What a long 23-hour, 9-time zone day!
It was a fortifying lunch at PDX at Deschutes Brewery that included a Fresh Haze IPA that started today's adventure. We were lucky to have picked one of the better long distance airlines, Delta. The 50-60 mph tailwind reduced our in-flight time to 9-hours.
The first navigation nightmare was Amsterdam Airport and passport control.
Signage left a lot to be desired. If you don't allow 2-3 hours of transfer and connecting time .. you may miss the next flight! On top of this, we were delayed almost 1-1/2 hrs because of a staff shortage on their pushback tractor drivers!
Dozens and dozens of planes waited at their gates for these drivers!
We became more and more anxious as the next legs of our adventures was to get through very confusing Frankfurt Airport and to make connections at three train stations! Yikes.
Here we are at Passport Control in Amsterdam. We finally made it to the Frankfurt Airport Long Distance Train Station where you can train to anywhere in Europe!
German name : Frankfurt am Main Flughafen Fernbahnhof.
Jan's holding up well so far as we await the first of three train legs.
The key to all of these European train stations is to download the train line's APP and use it to determine the connecting PLATFORM that you need to get to to get on the next train in time. Here's a sample of what I prepared to help us get there:
16:01 ICE 229 Platform 4 depart 1hr 31min ride
17:32 arrive Wurzburg Hbf Platform 5 9-min transfer time
17:41 RE 80 Platform 2 depart 47-min ride
18:24 arrive Steinach Platform 3 21-min transfer time
18:45 RB 82 Platform 5 depart 14-min ride
18:59 arrive Rothenburg ob der Tauber !!!!
We arrived, walked our luggage for about 10-minutes to our very cute hotel :
See the 2nd floor corner room with the three gabled dormer windows? That's ours, very cute. We were famished. The owner recommended some German restaurants on the way to old town. We freshened up and walked another 10-min to a 150-year-old restaurant that really met our needs! A glass of beer (Pils), a glass of wine, veal wiener schnitzel with cucumber potato salad and a Bavarian pasta filled with meat .... yummmmy!
It's time to crash! We have two full days to discover Rothenburg! More fun pics tomorrow! Take care.
Phew, you made it through the train stations! You had a good plan which I'm sure helped make all those transitions smooth!
ReplyDeleteHow do you two look so good after so many hours of travel? Both of you look wide awake and ready to go!
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