Pre-flight adventure

One week ago I posted a list of promises, a list enumerating all the details I planned to hand on to the readers of this blog. It’s high time to give at least some of my stories on to you. Before I do so, however, I’d like to refer you to my flickr photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rys07 . Up to date there is a collection of approximately 50 pictures from the road trip. As soon as flickr makes it possible to me (I think at the beginning of next month) I’ll upload some more, hopefully amazing, pictures of my first week in Golden, CO, of the summit attempts and our excursion to the Garden of Gods near Colorado Springs.

Anyway, it was early in the morning when my girlfriend, Harald and I departed for Graz Int’l Airport (actually people in Graz rather call it Thalerhof but for us it was Graz Int’l Airport). My girlfriend asked me whether I had taken all important documents I would need for check-in and immigration. It was only at the check-in desk when it turned out that we had forgotten to take the US address of Harald’s brother along to the airport, which for us personally was not a big deal because he was going to pick us up anyway, however, the check-in lady was not ready to actually check us in without an address in the US she could hand on to the US immigration office. Certainly, we could have called Ulrich in the US but then we realized it was night in the Mountain Time Zone. It did take me some time to come up with an intelligent solution but in the end I managed to dig out a route planner where an arbitrary address, including the ZIP code was mentioned. Hence, we decided that, at least for US immigration officers, we were going to spend our first night there. This was the pre-flight adventure.
Right, if there is a pre-flight adventure there has to be a flight adventure as well. Read about the latter one in the next message.