THE FINAL CHAPTER

Written back in the USA

We walked about six blocks last night to the Italian Restaurant. When we passed the gas station where we’d filled our car up prior to arriving at the hotel, the boys told us about the accident they’d come upon just after it had happened at that intersection. A bicycle rider was hit by a car…there was still blood in the street where the cyclist had fallen. In the USA it would have been cleaned up by now! We were really surprised.

Dinner was a salad for Shari, pizza for I, Jim had pasta and Dave ate a pocket pizza and of course Beer! Walked home the long way past an Italian ice cream store for our final double dip! Arrived home and no rain…we’d taken umbrellas as it’s looked like rain all day!

Difficult to stay awake but with CNN we managed to stay up until 9:30 PM. Heard they’ve had some bad fires in Yuba City near Sacramento…lost several homes.

Woke up by 6 AM and finished packing the bags and getting everything ready for the trip home. We’d packed the car and eaten breakfast before 8 AM. Off to the airport. Returned the car with no problems and found that we’d driven 4,310 kilometers which is about 2,680 miles during our trip. The car had less than 400 miles on it at the beginning of our trip. We said our good-byes at the car rental office and started the process of getting out of Germany. It took over an hour to go through all the checks and re-checks that they do. Had to turn on the video camera and the computer.

In the final line we met a man who had been in Chernobyl for forty five days. He was in charge of a twenty one member team for the World Health Organization and they had been setting up a monitoring systems for checking radiation levels. He hold patents on the Dallas, Texas and Paris, France airport tram systems. He’s now on his way to Mexico to attempt to solve their problems with their new telephone system. He owns his own company of about twenty five employees in Atlanta, Georgia. Overweight and very ordinary looking.

Our flight left about twenty five minutes late, about 10: 40 AM. We went through customs in Dallas, Texas. Our flight was over ten hours long to Texas. Rough, especially since we switched seats so that we could sit together and ended up in the second to the last row. Only pizza left for dinner as the steak and chicken was taken. Had two movies…one was Liar, Liar the other one was The Saint.

Arrived in Dallas and found that instead of a three hour lay over we were going to be four hours since they had a bad rain storm that morning and everything was delayed. Jim managed to get us on an earlier flight (and also vouchers for $20.00 for food while we waited). So after only a few hours at Dallas we were on our way to LAX. Made calls from Dallas and found that Kelly will be picking us up at the airport. Due to arrive at 7:14 PM; California time….that’s about 4 AM the next day on German time; about eighteen hours after we left Germany. Long, long day!

Our luggage didn’t make the same flight as we did; but true to their word it was delivered to our door by 5 AM on Thursday morning! Glad we took the earlier flight!