All my bags are packed...I'm ready to go...

1/1-1/2 And we're off! Steven and I hit the road this morning after a not-so emotional goodbye with our families (good thing, not bad!). We met with another girl, Megan, that is going to be an elementary/special ed teacher and took off for Chicago. That plane was exceptionally roomy and the flight went very fast. After deboarding, we caught a nice lunch at Chili's before our next flight out and met up with two of the other six teachers, Bill and Sarah. I was very much looking forward to the international flight as I have heard great things about flying internationally! Unfortunately, our Chicago-Frankfurt plane was crammed compared to the Indy-Chicago one. However, the food was GREAT! We had two full meals along with snacks and apparently free beer and wine, which I realized too little too late.

We arrived in Frankfurt around 7:00 am and met with the sixth and final teacher, Andrea. We were all very excited and ready to deboard! After we made it down to the baggage claim, we were pumped to buy our train tickets. We were afraid our luggage was lost since about half the bags from our flight came out, and it was another hour before the other half did. Thank goodness everyone got their luggage! After all the bags were claimed, we purchased a group discount ticket toward Saarbrucken (our stop is before that at Neubrucke).

The train ride was nothing less than absolutely entertaining! To begin with, six of us tried to get on with about three bags each, resulting in the doors trying to close on us. Then, since we all crammed into the area between two cabins, we were physically stuck due to all the luggage, and it took help from a very nice man to "unstick" ourselves so that we could actually get into a cabin to sit. We learned our lesson... Some Germans are quite characters and very social. That hour and a half ride went very fast due to the entertainment. As I said, we learned from our mistakes and made a fool proof plan for the exit since we knew we'd probably have about thirty seconds: The girls (four of us) were going to carry as much as we could and jump off the train, while the guys throw, literally, the rest of the luggage off the train and deboard themselves. We all wished that someone was there with a stopwatch since it was executed BEAUTIFULLY! (The main challenge was Andrea's 59 kilo suitcase [129.8 lbs!]) Our supervisors saw the luggage go flying and got a huge kick out of it when we were all off.

Due to the federal holiday, we all spent the night at Pat Moore's apartment since we could not check into our rooms.

More to come...