June 15–16, 2014 Hamburg, Germany – Fort Collins, Colorado

Tobey and I left the hotel about 10:30 a.m. for our drive back to Frankfurt, Germany for our return flight to Colorado.  Estimated driving time was supposed to be about 4-1/2 hours. Again – road construction – and lots of it – made the drive much longer. We did ignore the navigation when she wanted us to change our route more than 50 km to avoid a delay on the road. It turned out to be only about 15 minutes! ANYWAY – the drive ended up being almost 6-1/2 hours!

Rental car returned to the airport, shuttle van to the hotel, and I had a panic attack because I couldn’t find our passports! Finally, buried at the bottom of my backpack, they appeared. We decided to walk to a restaurant for dinner since the hotel prices were extremely high. Well, this hotel is not near many things but we knew there was an Italian restaurant nearby that we had been to on a previous trip. What we didn’t realize was that most things are closed on Sundays in Germany – including this restaurant! The supermarket was closed, as well.

This wouldn’t deter the adventurous Tobey and Sue. We kept walking, and walking, and walking. Seemed to be mostly residential. We finally found two teenage girls and asked them if they knew if there were any places to eat that might be open. After some discussion, one of them said there was a place near where she lived and she was going home now and we could walk along. Thirty minutes later, we came to the first restaurant – closed. Another ten minutes we were at the train station area and there were a couple places to eat that were open. We said our thanks and goodbyes to her and chose the Turkish restaurant so Tobey could have his last doner sandwich! I had a small cheese pizza. Getting to the station, we had zig-zagged through neighborhoods, but managed to find our way back to the hotel taking a more direct route.

Monday morning we were on the 7 am shuttle to the airport and on our way home via Toronto, Canada. We caught a shuttle to Fort Collins where our friend, Wendy, picked us up and took us home. It was great to see our Moms who were taking care of Penny and our house while we were gone.

Now we are trying to get back into the routine and start thinking about the next adventure!