2/8/19 - Frankfurt

My fist foray into Europe landed me in Frankfurt. As I stated in my previous post, my final destination was to Rome, but I had to deal with traveling from one airport to the other. It was stressful because the departure time was very specific and I was standing there waiting for the bus to arrive. I can only anecdotally speak to my one afternoon in Frankfurt, but if the schedule says 4:52 pm arrival, it means 4:52. Not 4:51. Not 4:53. 

I hate riding on buses, but this was rather pleasant. The seats were great, Wifi was on board, and I got to see about 60 miles of Germany. Everything looked pretty clean and organized; however, there was a strip of houses that appeared to be one room shacks with outhouses and broken cars in the yards. I am learning that every country has a few less than picturesque neighborhoods.

In the end, I made it to the discount airport with an hour to spare. When I mentioned in an earlier post that traveling within Europe can be quite inexpensive; however, it is only cheap if you follow all of the rules. You will be paying for baggage, and even carryon bags for some of the airlines. My flight from Frankfurt to Rome was on Ryanair, and that turned into a challenge. I purchased my ticket through a terrible third party and never received the boarding pass in my email. So when I check in I find out that if they have to print a boarding pass it is 50 Euros, which is more than I paid for the flight. It turns out that Kiwi.com just makes up an email address and don’t tell you about it. All I needed was to figure out what the email address they gave to Ryanair and I could retrieve the boarding pass through the app. I went to the Ryanair office and they were able to give me the email address I had ever seen and got my boarding pass on my phone. It was a race for time because the discount airport in Frankfurt only allowed free wifi for an hour. I’ll give tips on this later, but make sure you have arranged phone service BEFORE the trip. It can save you a lot of headaches.

Next stop, Rome.