Stuttgart: Day 1

Door-to-door was 19 hours which isn’t too shabby. I’ve got some pictures up on my site of the trip as well as a little bit of Stuttgart itself.

Couple of notes on the whole trip:

* Getting out of Seattle was crazy. The flight was over booked and they have one guy working this huge line. I compare that to United and how they have completely stream-lined their process, even to their partners. My flight was with Northwest Airlines who partners with KLM. It was just a particularly painful process.

* I have never been so well-fed on a flight. It was 9 hours 5 minutes from Seattle to Amsterdam and I had dinner, a snack of a turkey sandwich, a drink break and finally breakfast. My lord; I don’t eat that well in the US … haha … BTW - did you know
that only 14% of departing flights leaving PDX? That’s just crazy to me. At least they have free wireless. SEATAC anted $9.99 for me to use a day pass.

* While on the flight to Amsterdam, there was a break between movies and there was (I kid you not) an 10 minute ad for Microsoft Business Solutions. What?! I guess world travellers are their target audience?

* Amsterdam is probably the nicest airport I have ever seen. Massive doesn’t even begin to describe it. We had to taxi close to 12 minutes just to get to our gate. So here’s the funny part. Massive as it is, its horribly, horribly laid out. I had 25 minutes to literally walk 2 miles as well as get through customs (although somebody just looked at my passport and waved me through … weird). I just made my flight.

* The Stuttgart aiport was great … small, easy to navigate, etc. I got my bags, hopped in a cab and was to my hotel in about 15 minutes. Stuttgart is a beautiful city. It’s nestled in this amazing little valley with loads of modern meets classic architecture. Oh, and its friggin’ hot. It was 90 degrees F when I got here … doh!

So I’ll just put this out there … anybody know of a travelling blog site? I’m thinking something like craigslist meets Go! Europe meets some login site … you could login and talk about the places you travelled, places to see, places to avoid, etc … there has got
to be something like that. If anybody knows about it, please let me know … I’ll do something about Stuttgart …

More tomorrow … good night everybody …