Heading for Germany, Holland and Belgium

I thought that summer would never come. This time last year, Kathy went to Israel with Calvary Chapel, while I stayed home and worked. I was ready for a vacation.

I started shopping for airline tickets right before fall semester. I considered flying Norwegian Air, and also looked at all the traditional carriers. We really wanted to fly non-stop, though. I eventually chose Air Berlin, which has one non-stop from LAX to Dusseldorf every day.

I bought the ticket in August for $750 each; the other non-stop flights were all at least twice as much. In fact, when I looked on Expedia a week later, the prices for the same Air Berlin flight had doubled as well.

Since we got such a deal, we could afford to upgrade our seats to the XL section, which you can see right behind Kathy's head. The extra legroom was nice. (Although I wanted to tell them that I'm really at least a XXX-L).

We left on time and landed in Dusseldorf the next day at 2:00 pm. There's a train station right in the airport, so we immediately caught a train to Aachen our first stop, and original capital of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire. Right outside the train station we found these horses, reminders of Charlemagne's stables.

We got checked into our hotel (the 3 Kings) right on the main square by 5:00 pm. We walked around for  a while; both of us were pretty tired, Kathy more than me, because I was able to sleep a little bit on the plane. We had our first dinner right on the square out in front of our hotel at the Golden Unicorn.

The view from our table was the city hall (Rathaus) was impressive.

For those of you asking about the food, Kathy had baked Camembert with cranberry sauce, while I went for the safety of the Schnitzel in peppercorn sauce.

 After dinner we walked a little more and stopped for some gelato and collapsed by 9:00 pm.