Sharon and I are off again exploring the world. Following in the Tomasins' and Swedbergs' footsteps, we are taking the Viking Passage to Eastern Europe with a pretour in Prague. Sharon's brother Tom did the longer Viking Capitals of Eastern Europe trip last year that covered much of the same ground. Over the next two and a half weeks, we will be exploring the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.
Spending the night at the San Francisco Airport Marriott, we slept late and had a lazy morning. We had an expensive medicore breakfast buffett at the hotel. We had talked about hiking the Bayshore Trail that runs along the hotel, but it was raining off and on.
About 11 am, we caught the shuttle to the airport. The luggage check-in went quickly. We breezed through security with CLEAR and TSA Pre. We found a nice spot at the Bourbon Pub to watch the second round of the Masters, have a glass of Rose and a light lunch.
Much to our chagrin, Viking Air has booked us on a three leg trip to Prague: San Francisco to Dallas to Madrid to Prague. We had a 2:10 pm flight to Dallas. Unfortunately, the plane was late getting to SFO. It was after 2:15 pm by the time that we started to load the plane. We had seats 8B and 8C against the bulkhead at the front of the main cabin. Pulling away from the gate, the plane spent 40 minutes in line to take off. Apparently, there is a runway closed and under repair.
We were pleased to be able to watch the last few holes on the inflight entertainment system. Rory finished at the day at -11, six strokes ahead.
We were on the ground in Dallas about an hour behind schedule. This left us an hour to catch the flight to Madrid. It was a little bit of a circus. The flight didn't show a gate on the departure board. Asking at an American counter, they just told us to keep going in the direction that we were going. As we stopped to use the restroom, they announced that the Madrid flight was Gate D3.
The Iberian flight to Madrid boarded late. We have two nice premium economy seats--12J and 12L--in a very small three row section. The flight pulled away from the gateway about 40 minutes late. Given that we only have about an hour and half between flights in Madrid hopefully they will make up some time.
I am writing this using the wifi on the plane as we fly east. Hopefully, I will eventually be able to get at least a couple of hours sleep.
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