Day 14: All Good Things Must Come To An End

And so we wrap up our European Anniversary vacation.

We had an 11 am flight and we wanted to get there with plenty of time since we absolutely did not want to miss our flight.  We also had to allot time to process our paperwork for our Global Tax refund.  So we got to bed early and woke up with plenty of time so we didn't miss our train ;)

We checked out and walked to the metro station.  We actually took the metro one stop over to the central station to buy our ticket to the airport.  We could have walked, but since we had a HUGE duffel in addition to what we originally bought, we figured it be safer on our backs to take the metro than walk.  Buying our tickets was easy, but figuring out which train to take was the hard part.  It's not abundantly clear which train is coming in and where it takes you.  We had to ask a nice man which one to go on.  Apparently, the train we wanted was also running late, so if he didn't keep updating us on the status, who knows where we would have ended up.

The train showed up ad we got on.  A short ride later and we were at the airport.  We spent a couple minutes finding the customs office to get our stamps.  The line wasn't too long because not a lot of people do the Global Tax it seems.  It took a while because we were behind a huge family of Asians who bought so much Gucci and Prada my head was spinning.  We finally got our stamps and then we went to check in.  That was pretty painless and like any other airport check in.

We had our boarding passes in hand and went through border patrol and were home free in the terminal.  We mailed off the Global Tax forms and checked out our gate.  We then proceeded to the lounge, of course.  We had plenty of time to kill, so we ate some breakfast of free coffee, croissant, pain au chocolat, orange juice, and yogurt.

An hour before departure, we went down to the gate.  Our flight was delayed an hour.  We picked up some last minute souvenirs and then went back up to the lounge.  We were a little concerned that we would miss our connections since we have to go through customs once we landed in Atlanta.  We had a 3 hour layover.

We finally boarded our flight and settled in the for the long flight ahead.  It was just like the flight out except in reverse order.  Instead of dinner and breakfast, we got lunch and dinner.  No pictures of the meal, but I had a shrimp salad for the second meal and can't remember what was for the first.  Oh well.  I didn't sleep as much as the first flight since it was 12 pm by the time we were air born.  We landed in Atlanta with two hours until our next flight.  We rushed off the plane, went through border control, picked up our bags, went through customs, dropped off our bags, went through security with plenty of time to spare.

Of course, we went to lounge for some snacks and drinks before our flight.  We finally got onto our last flight and were headed home.  We landed in Columbus, picked up the rental car and were on our way home!

We were so tired, we didn't even get dinner.  I started to unpack and I think I even did a load of laundry.  I had a full day of house packing to do the next day.  I wouldn't get any rest until the day after I returned to San Diego.

So that was our European vacation.  It was amazing and we learned a lot about each other and ourselves.  I would love to do another international trip soon.  Just a matter of saving up vacation, money, and miles!