First thing first: Sara and I are back in the states as of July 29th.

Also, as promised, photos of the wedding of Ali Thompson to Chris Constantine. Chris and Ali are fabulous together and their wedding at the Marion County Central Library in downtown Indianapolis was amazing. Everyone had a great time and we are grateful to have been invited.

Photos of our trip to Europe will follow shortly. I will try to space them out to avoid dumping an unreasonable number of photos on my readers.

This is the first Europe trip post covering the events July 7, July 8, and July 9 of the year 2008.

On July 7th/8th we flew to Europe. We took Virgin Atlantic across the pond. Stopped at Heathrow, and after a brief wait in terminal 5 we boarded our British Airways flight to Franz Josef Strauss International Airport a.k.a. Munich International Airport.

After arriving in Munich and making it to the Hauptbahnhof we set out to look for our hotel. This was not an entirely successful operation the first time. I managed to ask for and receive directions in German from a parking valet and we safely arrived at ArtHotel Munich.

We used what little remained of the afternoon to settle in and decompress from the flight. Eventually we managed to contact Sara's former lab mate Sam (mentioned earlier in /var/log/nolandda here). She now lives with her husband Chris in Munich and they were kind enough to take us out to the Hofbräuhaus am Platl despite the fact that Sam was 8.5 months pregnant with her first child (a healthy girl named Ruby) at the time. After a long flight and an evening of drinking we quickly fell asleep which brings us to...

July 9th. We got up at a reasonable hour, grabbed some breakfast at the hotel and went out to see the city. We started at the Frauenkirche. As you can see in the photoset for July 9th we first climbed the tower before descending to examine the Teufelstritt and other features of the cathedral.

We then got some fresh fruit juice at the Viktualienmarkt, watched the automata on the Rathaus-Glockenspiel run through their paces at noon, explored the Theatinerkirche, and wandered the Hofgarten. There we saw the Bavarian Staatskanzlei and a war memorial. This lead us up into the English Garden and from there to a canal outlet where people were, I kid you not, surfing in the middle of Munich. After all that excitement we had just long enough to poke our heads into Peterskirche, pick up our luggage from the hotel store room, grab a bite to eat and hop on the sleeper train (Schlafwagen) to Paris.