Farewell to St. Augustine and another mishap

Sunday morning, our last day in St. Augustine, started out fine, sunny, hot from morning on, and interesting, too: The Pirate Museum - a unique museum – transported us back in time over 300 years to the Golden Age of Piracy with big names like Sir Francis Drake or Robert Searles.

The best tour by far in St. Augustine was the following one, given by Grimm, a fabulous tour guide and talented actor, in the Colonial Quarter. He introduced us to the four most important periods in St. Augustine’s history: three different "departments" in this openair museum introduced to the Spanish time (First City/16th century, Fortified Town/17th cent. and Garrison Town/18th cent.) and one was concentrated on the British period (14th Colony/18th cent.).

Grand Finale: Fried shrimps in different variations at Barnacle Bill’s, afterwards departure for the airport (again in different groups and with different shuttlebusses). We arrived early (3:20 pm) for our scheduled 5 pm departure to Atlanta. JAX Airport is very airy, bright and modern, all fine first...

Then, briefly before boarding, we got to know that the arriving plane has to undergo a complete technical check because of a seagull which had hit one of the turbines; 4 to 5 hours delay (later it was rescheduled for the next morning). This initiated a run for the counter to get rebooked (long lines, of course), but since we would have missed our connecting flight to Amsterdam in any case, we got rebooked for monday - another day lost! This was especially annoying because we already had a cancelled flight and a one-day-delay on the way over to the U.S.

Well, since we were booked on a direct flight from ATL to MUC (no stop-over in Amsterdam) and received a hotel voucher, we wouldn't have complained too much... Provided, the agent at the counter would have been a little friendlier and, especially, if the waiting time at the luggage carousel wouldn't have been 2,5 hours!!! At 8 pm we finally checked into the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the airport. Drank a beer at the bar to soothe our nerves and retired early. Couldn't believe that it had happened again, twice on one trip!

Tuesday morning eventually we got on a flight out of JAX to ATL, last row seats (stand-by list). Only positive aspect of this trip was that we were upgraded from ATL to MUC to First/Business class and got much better food and drinks (see pic) and could stretch out with real pillows and comforters. Nevertheless, didn’t sleep much and, when we finally arrived to MUC on Tuesday morning we were greeted with a little over 50 deg. F and light rain instead of the comfy 80-90 deg. we had in Florida.