Travel to:
I flew out of Newark on Lufthansa for apprx. 380 including taxes. Plenty of carrier options and off-season flights make for a real bargain as far as airfares go. I managed to pick up a couple hours sleep on the flight over, which was a red-eye and arrived in Germany around 8AM. I reserved a BMW 3er from sixt and was upgraded to a Mercedes E-class for free. I was feel pretty good about my luck so far until I turned on the nav system, which is useless at first glance unless 1) you read German and/or 2) you find some sucker to teach you how to use it. I was anxious to get started, so I set the nav system to GPS to at least give me an idea of position and headed out of the airport.

Honey, I'm home:
Well not exactly. Perhaps it's me, but I immediately felt like a duck out of water. SEA whether it be mainland china, the Philippines, or LoS seems much easy for my to get acclimated and feel “settled” in. Being ignorant when it comes to the German language, finding your way is tedious to say the least. Road signs often do not indicate the highway names or orientation, German drivers are an impatient bunch, and the town/street names are a mouthful. After an hour I finally made it to my hotel (6 or so miles from airport). The hotel doesn't have free parking (~26 euros a day for parking), no ATM in sight or in close proximity, and internet access is 20 euros/day. By the way, I stayed at the Frankfurt Marriot. The room was as expected and I'm paying with points, so I won't bitch too much. If it wasn't for points though, you would be foolish not to book elsewhere. In hindsight, I wouldn’t even recommend it with a free room. Parking and internet access comes to around 60-75USD/day depending how often you pull in/out of the parking garage.

HINT: you NEED a full map of the area/s you expect to visit. Do not count on printouts from map24 or the freebies you pick up at the hotel.

After taking car of some odds and ends, I embarked on the journey to Atlantis.

Part 2, Day 1 Atlantis…