Before my year of travel wrapped up, I needed to get from Passau, where our Viking River Cruise ended, to Dublin, where I was joining a land tour around Ireland. It turned out to be more of a challenge than anticipated. I’m sharing this, without photos, just as a warning to anyone who is contemplating a German train trip or a flight from Frankfurt.
First, the train trip. While the trip itself was fine, I got a lesson in reading the fine print. I made the reservation far in advance, choosing seats and paying on the website. Once on the train, I realized I had only the email confirmation, so I pulled up the email to show the conductor. She was clearly annoyed, telling me the email only confirmed the seat reservation, which is a separate cost. The actual fare required a separate payment. She said there would be a fine for boarding the train without a ticket, and then went away. A woman sitting across the aisle came over and helped us purchase the ticket online with my phone, but since we had already left the point of origin we could only buy a ticket from the next stop forward. So that’s what we did. The original conductor didn’t return, but another nice gentleman came through, looked at our hastily purchased ticket and simply said, “Thank You.” Crisis averted. Of course, the fare was much higher due to the last-minute purchase.
Once we arrived in Frankfurt, my friend Anna went off to meet her brother, and I headed for the Hilton hotel in the airport. I chose that hotel because it’s literally inside the terminal, so it would be easy to get to my departure gate for my flight to Dublin, right? Wrong. The hotel is in Terminal 1. My departure gate was moved to Terminal 2. That became a two-hour trek the next morning to arrive at my gate. Signage was misleading or nonexistent, directions from airport personnel were also lacking or misleading, and I found myself wandering in large circles. At one point, by carefully following the signs, I ended up back at the same spot, talking to the same person who gave me the original directions. It seems he failed to mention that I needed to take a bus (which involved a half-hour ride from terminal to terminal.) Once I got to the correct terminal it was another case of wandering through a labyrinth of poorly signed areas. And here I thought the Germans were the people who were so organized!
So take my advice: when buying rail tickets from the German Rail website, make sure you have a ticket, and not just a reservation. And avoid the Frankfurt airport if at all possible.
