Most of the time
I do not enjoy travel days. They tend to be very long with lots of bad
attitudes, snappy comments and sore backs. Yesterday, however, was the most
interesting and fun travel day of the year!
It all started
when we left our apartment with team Tikvah at 3pm. After 1 metro stop a few
wrong turns and a few rain drops we found our way to a group of taxis willing
to take us to the airport in our price range.
We arrived at
the Kiev airport at 4pm and began the fun World Race past time of hurrying up
to wait. We could not check in until 5:30 so we found some expensive food and
waited.
After check in
we made our way to the gate. The airline we flew with does not assign seats so
everyone was lining up and began pushing when the doors were opened. Again, we
rushed to the bus that would take us to the plane, trying to get a good spot to
stand so we could be first out of the bus and onto the plane. God decided to
laugh at us because the doors opened on the opposite side of where we chose to
stand!
Two hours later
we landed in Memmingen Germany where a taxi needed to be called to pick the 10
of us up. 45 minutes later the 10 of us were shoved into a van and on our way
to the Memmingen train station. At 10:40 we arrived at the train station. By
the time we got organized and prayed we had missed the last train to Munich.
(Keep in mind Munich is about an hour and a half from Memmingen.) It didn’t
matter anyway because we felt like we were supposed to take the 6 hour train to
Munich. This train would take us about 30 minutes to Ulm where we would wait 10
minutes and catch a train to Salzburg Austria. The train was late and while we
waited we were told that the tickets we purchased were not the correct ones to
take us to Salzburg. So at 2am we set up camp in the train station where we
would wait until 4:46am to catch a train to Augsburg Hbf. Once we arrived in
Augsburg at 6am we would wait until 9am for our next train to Munich. We ended
up pulling out our sleeping bags and blankets and sleeping on the floor at both
locations. We were quite the site,
as we all looked like homeless people.
At one point someone walked by us, laughed and made a snoring noise. It
was quite comical. At 8:45 we realized that we got off the train at Augsburg
Osstenstien instead of Augsburg Hauptahnof and needed to catch a train very
quickly to get to the correct train station to catch our train to Munich. A
quick 5 minute train would get us to our Munich bound train which we were on
for about an hour and then finally landed in Munich! So at 10 am, 11 hours
after we started our journey, we arrived at our destination.
It was a very entertaining
travel day and our team really enjoyed spending it with Tikvah! Now I am
exhausted and ready for bed!
