Today we are leaving for Europe where we plan on visiting both family and friends and also touch one more new country. And of course explore Germany, the country where we met and started our travels together quite some time ago. But first we have to leave Phoenix and given that the plane flies out from Terminal 4 we can access the Chase lounge which for certain has better food than most other lounges we can enter.
It takes seemingly forever to leave the Phoenix airport, it seems one runway is closed and there is a long line for the only open one. We are happy when we finally take off, it is time to start our adventure.
First stop is Houston airport where we don’t have a lounge so we explore the airport a bit. There are some interesting locations with the most fun being a distillery type shop that of course sells alcohol in lots of forms.
And then it is time to walk to the gate and take the plane for the transatlantic flight. The flight is business as usual with edible food and some good entertainment and even a bit of sleep. And then we arrive in Munchen, it is now time to find the gate for our flight to Cluj in Romania.
The Munich airport is huge and it takes some time to pass through it, luckily with our European passports we can avoid the longer lines and soon are in the Schengen area in a virtually empty waiting hall. This is where a satellite airline of Lufthansa was previously flying but they closed it down just a few months ago so the gates are not in use. Here we have a long wait in front of us and no lounge so we use the available seats to relax while waiting for the flight.
And we wait for a long, long time. The plane gets delayed and then delayed again. And then it changes gates. And then the airport closes down due to a thunderstorm. Left and right flights are cancelled. Somehow through all this our plane does not get cancelled and during a break in the rain they even decide to board it, maybe we will make it out, with a two hour delay?
And yes we do make it out and after passing through the storm the weather is actually good enough. In Cluj it actually it is quite nice which is good as we have to walk outside to get to the buses to the terminal.
It takes a bit to load the buses but then we get to the terminal where we have to wait again for the luggage. Luckily ours are between the first ones and then we meet with our relatives who take us to our accomodation for the night where we fall asleep almost immediately after a fast dinner.
