Our flight back home from Munich was fairly early so we got up at 3:30 in the morning, which was actually fifteen minutes before our alarm was set to go off. We were ready to go by 4:30 but waited until about 4:45 before leaving the hotel room.

We had arranged for our car to be picked up from the garage by 5:00 and were pleasently surprised to find out that it was outside waiting for us. It took a few minutes to get the address to the airport programmed into our car’s GPS because we didn’t realize that the Munich airport was not in Munich.

There wasn’t much traffic that early in the morning so we got to the airport fairly quickly but finding the rental car drop off was a bit confusing but after one or two wrong turns we found it. It was organized chaos with what seemed like hundreds of cars waiting to be processed.

Once inside the airport we had some problems figuring out where to go but that is why we gave ourselves plenty of time. We had an 8:50 flight but boarding started much earlier, at 7:45. I suppose that is because we had to take a bus to the plane.

Our trip back from Germany was not as bad as the trip to Germany. The long flight was earlier in the day and the hours of sitting didn’t seem to cause me as much pain as did the flight to Munich.

I think the only part of the return trip that was a hassle was going through customs when we got to Charlotte, North Carolina. The process seemed designed to make it as inconvenient for travelers as possible. We first had to go through customs and then we had to pick up our luggage and go through customs again, but this time with our luggage. Since they didn’t bother looking through our luggage, I don’t know what the point was. Why the customs people just couldn’t be on hand while everyone’s luggage was transferred to other flights is a mystery to me. It would have been much easy and faster for travelers.

We then had to stand in a very long line to go through a security checkpoint again even though we had just come off of an airplane and had already been screened in Munich.

If we arrived on a domestic flight and then transferred to another domestic flight this would not have been done. This tells me they don’t trust the screeners in Germany and other countries but if that is the case, why do they allow them to fly into the country in the first place?

Once we got through security, we found a pizza restaurant and had lunch. I then found a Starbucks and couldn’t resist buying a real American coffee with heavy cream. It was very difficult to find coffee with real cream in Germany. Everyone offered only milk and usually that was low fat milk.

We flew back to Tampa in another sardine can but at least the window shades were open this time and the person next to me wasn’t hogging the arm rest so it was tolerable.

When we finally arrived in Tampa, it was about 6:30 in the evening. We had been awake for 21 hours and we were exhausted. Once we got our luggage, we ordered an Uber which took only about five minutes. Taking an Uber to and from the airport was a very smart decision because it not only saved us about fifty dollars in parking fees, it also saved us gas and we didn’t have to risk parking our car in a public lot for ten days. Plus, we were too tired to drive.

We had a wonderful time in Germany and I hope we can go back again in a few years, but after a long trip we were very happy to get home to our cats.

That is the end of our trip but I still have more to say about Germany. I hope you will look for my next post when I compare some of the differences I noticed between Germany and the United States.