The alarm clock rang 7.15 after 4,5h of sleep. Much too short for my taste. I felt every beer and irish whiskey that Justin was carrying around as usual. Unfortunately staying in bed was no option as we had to catch a flight from Miami to Philly.
The breakfast room was empty and so were the streets when we drove to the airport and returned to car at the Alamo station. The Jeep patriot was 175 EUR a week incl premium insurance package and one tank of gas! A standard intermediate car would have been 150 EUR so I can only recommend to pay the extra 3-4 EUR per day and enjoy the cool american style SUV driving. "I want my SUV" (was that Mark Knopfler singing in "Money for nothing"?).
At the airport we had to find out that our flight was delayes over a hour. We have two hours in Philly so we should still be able to make the connection flight to Frankfurt. The good thing was that they had free Wi-Fi at the US Airways gate so I could upload last night's pictures to Flickr where Yome is grabbing them to put them up here. The livephish.com downloads of all 4 nights are already on my Blackberry and ready to be explored in depth over the next couple of hours.
When we entered the plane I discovered soul singer John Legends sitting in the first class. Prominent travel mate I would say ;) The flight itself was horrible. Bumpy turbulences for 2 hours. My stomach was spinning in circles - the beers an whiskeys, you remember?
Philly to Frankfurt was on time. Nothing exciting on the 8h flight but I got a beer for free (instead of 7 USD) because a salad bowl felt off the wagon of the stewardess when she was passing by and landed on my lap. Frankfurt to Berlin (usually a 50min flight) was also on time but couldn't land in Berlin because the airport was shut down for about 60-90min due to heavy snow fall. Once on the ground we couldn't get a parking position as the other planes couldn't start during the closing period. It took ages until we finally had the bags, passed customs (no officer on duty at all) and jumped into a cab that drove us to our flat. I hardly remember so much snow in Berlin. What a contrast?! +28°C sun and beach to -10°C snow and concrete. We have 2 days left to fully recover before Natalie and me both go back to work on Monday January 4th. My head is full of great memories and the trip and experience was definitely worth every Euro and minute of traveling. Would do it again without thinking twice! Take care all of you and happy new year again to the whole Phish community and sites which help us to connect, share, publish, etc. (phish.com, livephish, drygoods, fromtheroad, phishthoughts, bouncingaroundeuroom.eu, thisweekonlot.com, jambands.com, phish.net, phantasytour, glidemagazine, relix, archive.org, twitter, facebook, last.fm, youtube, flickr and many more).
