Safe and sound

Well, it's been a long while since I posted on this thing, I've been super busy this past month with finishing up placement and moving, Tim and I are in a NEW apartment. But the neatest thing going on in my life is that currently I am in EUROPE with two good friends from school. We arrived here safely on the 12th of September and will be here and touring around until the 28th when we fly back to Canada.

The trip over was loooooonnnnnng and full of adventures. We flew out of Toronto International at 6:45 pm and landed in Glasgow international airport at 6 am (their time). We actually had a huge tail wind during the flight so we had to wait an extra 25 minutes before we left Toronto and still landed 30 minutes early! (Btw, I'm using a german keyboard, so if you see any odd symbols or z's where y's should be, it's because they're in the opposite spots). Anyway, once we landed in Glasgow we had to get to the Prestwick airport, which is about 30 minutes outside of town. So we took a bus to the train station (rode on the other side of the road!) and then took a train to the airport. Since this airport only services one airline, and since our flight was so early, we ended up arriving at the airport 4 hours before our next flight! Needless to say, since it was 12 am (our time) and we had to sit in an airport for 4 hours with very little to do, it was hard to fight the sleepiness and stay amused. Somehow we managed.....and caught our flight to Dusseldorf Germany. The fun thing about this flight was that you had to pay extra to pick your seat, so the majority of us hadn't, and there was a mad rush of people when we were let through the gates to get seats. Denise was our hero in this department, boogying her butt through lots of people and getting us good seats behind the wing so we could see stuff. It was good. :P

We landed at the airport near Dusseldorf Germany at like 2:50 pm (another time zone over from Scotland) and had to book it to the train station to catch our train to Heidelberg. We took this fun taxi/van with a nice man who explained what we'd have to do once we got on the train to authorise our eurail pass, because we hadn't yet. He said all you had to do was show it to the conductor and he'd sign it etc. Well, we discovered that Germany operates on an honour system, because there was definitely no conductor on the train, so we rode for over an hour to the main train station before we got it validated. Ha ha....

From the main train station (I think it was in Dusseldorf) we had to take 3 different trains. The first transfer was fine, we made it in decent time, the second was ok as well (we even had time to grab some water). The third transfer was CRAZY! We pulled into the station and the conductor said over the loudspeaker that our train was leaving from platform 8 at 19:26 and it was 19:24 and we were on platform 5!! With our heavy, heavy packs we had to run through the station to platform 8, at which point we realised our train was on platform 9 across the tracks. We had to run like mad back down the stairs, down the hall and up another set of stairs (well, they were actuallz escalators but might have well been stairs because we were running!). Anyway, we made it, but the train was actually closing their last set of doors and we started yelling and the conductor saw us, so they re-opened them for us. But it was nuts....we almost didn't make it there.

We arrived safe (and EXTREMELY tired 24 hours in transit is alot) in Heidelberg....grabbed a quick bite to eat and went straight to sleep. We found out we had to pay extra for linen though, thank goodness I brought a bed sheet....it came in handy! I stuffed clothes in my pillowcase for the night, but today bought a bright pink pillow with german writing on it. She said it was a missing heart pillow i.e. I miss you Tim!!! :)

We are heading out to Munich tomorrow morning, so hopefully I will post some stuff about Heidelberg and our adventures here somewhere from Munich tomorrow. I'm running out of time on the computer....so it will have to come later.

Sorry there are no pics, thereäs no memory card slot in this computer....

A few prayer requests - my camera, specifically the battery, has been acting up - my camera keeps thinking that the battery is dead when it's fully charged, so I have to turn it off, take out the battery and put it back in, then it's fine. Pray it stops doing this.
- health and safety for me, Sherri and Denise
- good sleep for us the entire time

I miss you all

Laura