Day 26: Frankfurt Hahn

Today was mostly a travel day, but we still got to see the Lord at work. Both of us are almost completely healed from our colds. We were up before 7:00, had breakfast, checked out and got on a train to Steinach all before 8:00. Things were going perfectly.

When we got to Steinach, though, we were supposed to hop on a train for Wurtzburg. Instead, we accidentally followed everyone else on the platform and hopped on a train coming from Wurtzburg, going the opposite direction. We asked the conductor, and he told us to hop off at the first stop and then get on another train. When we got off, we found a fast train going to Nurnburg, rather than Wurzburg.

When we got to Nurnburg, we found a completely uncrowded English speaking reservation center, and were able to make the train reservations that we needed for Spain and Portugal; something that might have been difficult in Wurzburg. Even better, we were able to hop on a fast ICE train to Frankfurt (where we found some gifts that we were looking for) and then found another fast train to Mainz, where we hopped on the airport shuttle to Franfurt Hahn airport. Because of our "missed connection", we actually shaved several hours off of our original itinerary.

Once we got to the airport we checked into our hotel and then made some phone calls to nail down our last few reservations in Portugal and Spain. The only problem we had was finding a hotel in Madrid, which was completely filled up because of a national holiday. After making a dozen calls, we finally found a place, although it cost a little more than we liked.

We had a nice spaghetti dinner in the airport terminal, made a few more phone calls to our families, checked our email and headed over to bed pretty early. Our plane for Porto, Portugal leaves at 6:30 AM, and we have to check in 2 hours before that, so we need to get to sleep.