Our European Delivery experience started early on the 14th, so we had to arrive by the afternoon of the 13th. SMS and I traveled separately, which led to a pretty long travel day since his flight was rebooked with an arrival 3 hours after mine in Berlin. Yuck! Since I had gotten a Business Class points upgrade, I hung out in the First Class Lounge. This was great for the showers (@ Frankfurt- huge perk), free food/drink, and the comfortable chairs.
SMS and I reunited and headed towards the main Berlin train station on the TXL JetExpress bus. We bought our tickets but didn’t validate, which would have been a problem if we were caught. There was only one validation box on the bus and we couldn’t reach it through the crush of people. Later, I realized there was probably curbside one that we could have used.
We got to the train station and realized the train was leaving right.then. So we bought tickets for the next train and took a walk outside the train station. Outside, we walked towards the Spree River and admired the Reichstag building in the twilight. There was also a small Octoberfest going on outside the station but we gave it a pass.
After waiting on the platform for our delayed train, we got on the train to Leipzig where we walked through beautiful cobblestone streets to our hotel. Other than that brief walk, we didn’t get to see the city but it was quite pretty. We stayed at the Steigenberger Grandhotel Handelshof, which was quite beautiful. Most importantly, it had a really comfortable bed although I still had a little jet lag issue in the middle of the night.
Ok, speaking of sleep, this wasn’t the most exciting entry as it was pretty much a listing of our long travel day. But we saw a few things and most importantly, we had arrived and were ready for the start of our amazing vacation!
Portmanteau Suitcase 