We (Mom and I) left the Comox airport on Friday right after school. Grandma and Matthias were there to see us off and Auntie Deb came by too, but, when she arrived, we were already through security. We boarded our small (and loud) plane to Vancouver and arrived very quickly. After that was when the real part of the journey began.
After a nice dinner in the airport, and waiting on our delayed flight, we were finally on our way to London. We were surprised to receive a dinner on the plane and actually enjoyed most of the food (except the salad, it tasted too much of vinegar). I slept as much as I could but also watched some movies/tv (couldn't not watch Pitch Perfect ;) ). We arrived in London, tired and disheveled, but safe around 1:00 p.m. London time which is 6:00 a.m. Vancouver time.
We went through security again and anxiously waited for our flight to Munich. At Heathrow, there are 5 terminals and you catch a bus to go to each one, so we took our 10 minute bus from Terminal 3 to Terminal 1. In the airport, they don't post your gate number until very soon before your flight so we sat and waited for quite a bit of time and then moved on to our gate. The flight to Munich wasn't very long and it was exciting and relieving when we landed.
Customs was funny as they didn't ask me any questions at all, just stamped my passport and off I went. There was a Starbucks at the airport (there are McDonald's everywhere, which I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting the Starbucks (we've also seen some Subways)). The Munich airport has this large outdoor area that is partially covered in big white tarp and so we walked under that with the snow falling; it was a nice welcome to Germany :). We rented our car and after a bit of confusion on how it worked, got going on our way to Austria.
The drive was about 4 hours, and we stopped at a McDonald's that had an iPad bar. The McDonald's here look like fancy restaurants! They even had fresh tulips on the tables!
Driving through the mountains to our hotel was scary, but also an experience. The roads are very narrow and there are a lot of super steep streets (imagine a steep hill and a narrow street and then make it twice as steep and twice as narrow and you get the picture). It took a while, asking a bartender in a bar that felt like it was still in the 60's (Mom went in, I stayed in the car) and driving down a steep one-way street the wrong way, to arrive at our hotel, but finally, around 2:00 a.m. we arrived at Hotel Bellevue in Bad Gastein, Austria.
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