Germany

That's the plane I am going to be flying in as I head out of America, and to Europe for my first time!!!!!

I met with my travel buddy Sara today, and we booked our plane tickets! We took up my parents' suggestion to travel as a fake couple, so we bought two tickets together under my credit card name, and she reimbursed me. (Whee hee hee, this way the credit can go up under my name, I suppose.)

We are flying American Airlines, Flight 84. A Boeing 767-300 model, as you see here. At first we were thinking it was one of those freakin' double-decker planes, but instead it is just a widebody jet.

Since Sara has to work (she works retail, it's really hard to take time off) through December 30th, we are leaving together on New Year's Eve, December 31st. This will mark the first time ever that I've not watched Dick Clark's Rockin' Eve, to watch the "ball drop" on television at NY Times Square. But this is a good exception, eh?

We depart out of Chicago O'Hare aiport (huge scary airport #1) at 7:30 PM, CDT/Chicago. This means I may be flying over the Statue of Liberty for my New Year's celebration instead, how cool!!!!!

Chicago O'Hare Airport (ORD):


The flight runs nonstop, instead of bunking off at Detroit, and we will arrive in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Frankfurt International Airport (huge scary airport #2) at 11:10 AM Germany time on January 1st, the next day. Classes for us start on January 2nd.


Frankfurt Int'l Airport (FRA):


We leave Frankfurt, Germany, on Sunday, January 21, at 2:10 PM Germany time, and fly back to Chicago O'Hare by 5 PM, CDT/Chicago time. That is really going to mess with my body, especially since the spring semester of UWM starts on Monday, January 22nd. I officially declare myself tired for the first day of classes. Fortunately, it's all gopher duties on your first day back, like showing up to class, read through the syllabus, and take light notes for your first lecture.


Since we leave December 31st, this means I will no longer be able to do the 3-day Berlin excursion. I am severely disappointed, but I would much much rather travel with someone for the sake of my safety, rather than travel alone to just to be nosey in a new city.

Besides, this will not only be my first time flying out of the country (the flight is scheduled to be 8 hr, 40 min long), but it will be the first time I am flying somewhere without my parents. I'd rather have Sara be there with me, instead of me going it alone. This is a big world, and I am scared shitless for every second that I am excited to go!

Sara is proving impeccably handy to have with me, though. She is very very professional and thorough, and she researches anything before she gets herself into it. She was the girl who went to the CEAS Fall Career Fair with me, and had done hours of research on each company listed to attend, just in case she was pulled in to talk to them, and wanted to sound educated on them. She already got her passport a month ago, she already wrote up a list of things to pack for Germany, knows that she is packing everything in two 29" suitcases, and she is already looking up where to buy outlet adapter plugs to convert our male American ends of our electronics (such as on a hair drier or hair straightener) so that they fit into the female outlets in Europe.

She knows all about what it takes to fly from place to place, and not get lost in the shuffle of the busy airport lifestyle. She used to go to college at ASU out in Arizona, on a scholarship to play softball for them. However, she threw out her back and damaged it, thus ending her softball-playing career. ASU got too expensive, and she transferred back home to UWM. She likes it better here, though, and believes it was in her best interest to come back here. While she was out at ASU, she'd make weekend flights out to San Fransico, CA, or Colorado...pop $100 here or there to go see some sights, you know, no biggie or anything, sheesh!

I'll tell you, her motivation rubs off on you, too!! Instead of coming back home to collapse back in my bed to sleep until the mid-afternoon (since I had to wake up at the crack of dawn, 9 AM, to meet her, egad!), she got me all wound up to make a beeline back to my apartment, do my laundry, make some lunch, post on here, do all my homework, clean, and start calling up my cell phone and credit cart companies to make sure my communications work overseas, all before 3 PM. I might as well have run the marathon up the lakeshore all the way north to Port Washington!

Today, Sara tells me that she has wanted to go on this trip since last year, and has been watching airline tickets since then. Guys, she's been shopping for us for a whole year. That is awesome, how dedicated is she?! She was happy that the prices we got on the tix today were the lowest she's seen since a year ago, when they really are expected to be the cheapest. It is amazing to see how much the ticket prices change in a matter of hours, though, because eight hours ago I was looking these up and they were easily $30 more expensive last night than this morning...? Alas, Sara and I agree that if the price does continue to fluctuate, and they end up being $20 cheaper than what we paid for, that is alright, we aren't going to kill ourselves for it. We're happy we got the tickets all booked, and the cool part is, we don't even have to worry about holding onto a physical piece of paper! We were issued these "e-tickets" that automatically go into the airline's computer system, so on the day of our flight, we show up to our flight gate, tell the attendant our name, show them our passport, and they will look us up. BOOM, we're good to go, and we go hop on that Boeing 767.

We did end up purchasing the tickets through Expedia.com, and I would recommend that site to anyone, it is so slick and thorough!! It compared alllll these different airlines, showing you the one with the cheapest price. They show you what class you are flying in, how many miles you will be covering, how long the flight will be, which airport terminal to even go to within each airport, and the virtual map of the seats in the actual plane you'll be flying in, with color-coded chairs to tell you which seats are taken, and which are still available! Within 24 hours they will e-mail me telling me our seat numbers, and a virtual "boarding pass" that we can print out and bring to our flight gate as back up, just-in-case. As soon as I get that e-mail, I'll put up the virtual seating chart here, and mark which seats are ours, just so you can picture it in your mind. :)

So be thinking of me!! American Airlines Flight 84 on the way there. Flight 83 on the way back.

PURE exCITEment coming out of this girl, yayayayay!