| The Trip to Munich | ||
| Munich The City Pig's Knuckle Munich Zoo Museums Dachau Prague Venice Miscellaneous |
 Boeing 777 travel screen After I decided to go to Munich, where Amy has worked since November 2000, I carefully scouted fares and time of travel. The shortest trip was from Reno to Chicago on American Airlines and then a non-stop flight between Chicago and Munich. But a United flight between Reno and San Francisco and then a non-stop Lufthansa flight to Munich was only about 10 minutes longer each way and $150 cheaper. The one thing I wanted to avoid was flying to some other European city and then flying to Munich. My flight would leave Nov. 5 and I wanted to buy my ticket in advance to make sure I got comfortable seats. I saw the price drop so I bought my ticket through the United Airlines website, where I got double frequent flyer miles. On Sept. 9. After the terrorist attacks, I repeatedly checked the website for the status of my flight. Nothing changed. I was good to go. Then Amy mentioned she heard that Lufthansa canceled the non-stop flights between San Francisco and Munich. I checked the United Airlines website again, but nothing showed that. Finally, the last week of October, I checked the Lufthansa website. Sure enough, effective Oct. 3, Lufthansa's non-stop flights between Munich and San Francisco had been canceled. I confirmed the cancellation with a phone call to Lufthansa. I immediately called United Airlines and the representative assured me my the non-stop flight is still on. I told her I heard directly from Lufthansa that it had been canceled, so she put me on hold for about 15 minutes, came back and confirmed that, yes, it had been canceled. My trip now got rerouted and was much longer. And I didn't get the comfortable seats. So (forgive the rant) those two paragraphs explain why the photo at the top shows a San Francisco to Frankfurt trip instead of the quicker San Francisco to Munich flight. The Boeing 777 has a small television screen in the back of the seats that show movies and also tracks the airplane's flight. Obviously at this point my flight is passing out of Canada and approaching Greenland. I have a few more rants, but I promise they'll be much shorter. Click on the links at the left to visit my other pages and look at my photos.
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