Ok, we couldn’t resist – our Journey on the Journey….yeah, well. Anyhow, we spent a relaxing morning at the hotel, checking out as last as possible as our flight isn’t until noon. Through airport security and passport control easily, we head to the gate area, grab a coffee – but no pretzel! What? The pretzel place is out of pretzels? Come on now – that’s no way to wish travelers a fond farewell from Germany. Sigh….

So, coffee only it is. We hang out watching the goings on of other passengers and the gate agents finally arriving, ask if we can pay to upgrade to Business class, only to be told we would have to pay the full amount. Um, no – we aren’t paying thousands of dollars to fly Business class when there is virtually no one up there! So, our little 2 row seats in the “fake” bulkhead between economy and Premium Economy will be fine, thank you. The agent sweetly says he can give us entire rows to ourselves (the plane is virtually empty!), but we decline that offer as we aren’t going to sleep – it is a daytime flight! – and we don’t really need the room as these seats look pretty spacious.

Finally boarded – and the seats are great – the only drawback, it is a “fake” bulkhead and the FA won’t let me put anything under the seat until after we are off the ground. Weird. And the seats and entertainment screens are bulkhead – which means they pop out of the seat even though there are screens on the back of the seats in front of us. They just automatically run the flight information with no way to change the screen. But there are the cool under fuselage and over fuselage cameras that we can watch (from another guy’s screen in the seats in front of us – ours don’t work for some reason).

And thus begins a smooth and quite uneventful 10 hour flight. We read…I finish a book…Ed watches movies…I try to watch a movie, but fail. We eat some pretty good meals. We read more. We watch the cool plane cameras, look out the window as we reach the States and pass the frozen waterways that dot New York state and then on down the East Coast, finally hitting the cloudbanks we knew were coming as we near Charlotte.

Making our descent, you can really see just how much it snowed here. Wow! We are thinking we have a knack for missing big storms. And then we are landing and done with our travel. Nice and easy.

Global Entry a breeze, bags picked up, car picked up – we are on the road home in no time, arriving with plenty of time for a snacky-type dinner (we ate so much on the plane!) and to review our haul!

Great trip all around, and while we are sad to leave all our friends on Journey, we are happy to be safely home once more.