The Journey Begins

We got to the airport easily as just about everyone was where they wanted to be or had to be on the 4th. We had the good fortune to spend time in the SAS/Lufthansa lounge. Deb felt very comfortable there as every female who was not wait staff in the lounge had blond hair and blue eyes. The people even approached her and spoke to her in Swedish or German.

Lufthansa still has some amenities that weren’t eliminated during the last run up of fuel prices. While airline cuisine has not changed, the airline has spent more on the menus which all sound like you are going to have a meal equal to any five star restaurants. Well, they try, I’ll give them that.
I’m going to go to bed now. We’ll start up again while we wait for our plane in Frankfurt. Good night!

If it's Monday morning, it must be Frankfurt! OK, another Lufthansa lounge, another day of living the IKEA life. If anyone thinks Danish modern has gone out of fashion, well, think again. Blond wood, blond chairs, maybe a pop of color on the walls, but overall, ya know you're in Europe. A quick shower and we're off again. As we walked to the gate, it was another "duh" moment because the gate was on the ground floor. This could only mean one thing: tarmac or bus ride. Well it WAS a bus ride, standing as strap hangers as there were no seats and with about half the city of Hyderabad on board with us sweating in what the Germans must consider good air conditioning. Now, we were going on an Airbus A320. Not the biggest in their fleet now, but pretty damn big. As we got off the bus, there were the stairs. A good, long flight of stairs up to the plane. There were two types of stairs: one with and one without a cover. Deb's quick thinking: head for the one with a cover. It probably means something better than the one without one and 150 people standing in the hot sun waiting to get in.

Deb is comfortably set in her seat. You will note from the next shot of Deb that we made it to Hyderabad at midnight. It was pouring rain. Well, duh, it IS monsoon. While I didn't get it in the photo, Deb was being supported by two porters as we waited for our driver to get there.

Now the driver brought a small car to pick us up. There was luggage weighing down the car so the tires were rubbing on the wheel wells. Going over speed bumps was a major effort and when he put on the air conditioning, the car couldn't go any faster than 20 miles per hour. We got to the hotel around 1:30 am. The car was screened before we could enter the hotel area. All our luggage had to go through screening and we had to go through metal detectors before entering the lobby. By now, we're exhausted. We had all we could do just to find jammies and, of course, check e-mail.