May 31, 2008

For those of you still following our travels, we have two more days in Europe, then it's back to Canada. Yesterday, Jan found a tree in mom's yard that was starting to bloom, so we took a few pictures. Mom didn't know what type of tree it is, but as you can see, the flowers are two toned, orange and cream, and the whole tree is covered in blooms.



Today we rose early and after a big breakfast at my mom's, we waited for the taxi to arrive. We booked the taxi for 7:30, thinking that we needed to leave enough time for ourselves to get to the train station by about 8:30. When we arrived 10 days ago, it took an hour at least to get home, due to the traffic. Today, we made it in less than 30 min, so we had a long wait.

Our train finally pulled in and we were allowed to board at about 8:30. Then we waited, and waited, and waited. It went past our expected departure time, by 30 minutes, and we were getting a little nervous as we knew that in Vienna, we only had a 1/2 hour wait to get on the connecting train. There were a number of others in the same boat, wanting to get to Vienna in time to board another train. When the conductor came by we all asked if we could make up the delay, but he was unable to give us a definite answer.

Imagine our surprise when we arrived with minutes to spare. We rushed down the platform, since we were in the last car as the train nosed into the station, and I noticed an ICE train on the next track. We saw a conductor about 1/2 way down the platform and asked which track we had to go to, and when he heard or destination, he advised us we were at the right train, but had to go back to the "front" car. We boarded the train and it left in a matter of minutes. We were in the first car which was "1st class" and realized that our car included the driver of the train as well. There was a glass partition to the front of the car and the engineer sat in a big "arm chair" with a console in front of him to drive the train. Cool.

This train wasn't quite as fast as the one we took from Paris to Saar Brucken a month or so ago, but it still clipped along at a fair speed varying between 100 and 200 km/h. We saw some really beautiful country, but I found that the speed of the train combined with the tree-lined gully the tracks are in made picture taking difficult if not impossible. Every time I wanted to take a picture, a tree or tunnel obscured the shot by the time I got ready to shoot. We arrived in Frankfurt just before 8 pm and managed to find the hotel shuttle which took us to our hotel in a matter of minutes.

We have a beautiful suite in a new part of the hotel, so we're going to enjoy our last two nights in Europe. The shuttle will take us to the airport on Monday in time to catch our flight to London and by that night, we'll be back in Canada (after an 8 or 9 hour flight).