Welcome to Waldbronn!

[flickr]photo:2411318124[/flickr]

So I got here Thursday, and  I was really tired.  I was awake most of my flight from Philadelphia to London.  I think it’s just over 6 hours, they had 2 movies to show.  I watched part of Beowulf and don’t remember the ending.  Then the lights were on and food!
Landed at Terminal 4, and had to walk forever to transfer to Terminal 5.  Terminal 5 was rather smoothe…I only tried to leave the secured area once – and the police with the guns were polite enough to stop that, though they declined pictures. 
My flight out of London Heathrow Terminal 5 was delayed around 45 minutes.  They didn’t post the boarding gate until 15 minutes prior to departure – so that wasn’t such a good omen.  We finally boarded..and then sat anouther 45-60 minutes in the plane.  My seat was broken.  It constantly reclined…so I tok off in the reclined position despite the stewardesses obvious displearue.  Fix your plane.
Oh…and there’s no entertainment from London to Stuttgart.  Just the channel and France to stare out the window at…which I did.

Stuttgart seems to be a small airport, and I forgot to take pictures. (Did I mention I was tired?) Passport Control looked at me oddly when I said I was here on business until 10 May.  I got a stamp…and followed the English in front of me through the doors.
Awaiting for baggage, bags came up on the carousel, but they were from some other flight.  You could hear the groan from everyone as the anticipation was Terminal 5 messed up again.  A British Airways person was soon there, took all those bags and explained out bags would be out momentairly.  Thankfully, my bags made it!  I picked them both up and pondered where to go next.
When in doubt, head to people with guns.  They were standing front of the customs door, and apparently if you have something to decalre, you should still go through the other door because no one is there to really stop you.

I walked over to the Hertz rental car desk.  My first interactions with Germans!  As I only speak English, and I had no idea what became of my English -> German book…english it was.  I got a small car and he tried to upsell me to the Mercedes SLK…too bad the company wouldn’t flip that bill, eh?  I got some directions…two exits, across the walk, up the moving walkway.  Look for door B, go to level 1 and…umm..some other stuff.  I found the car easily enough.

Now…getting out of the airport…  I have a TomTom GO 920 GPS with European maps.  What a life saver!  Of course, GPS in a parking garage doesn’t work so well…so I followed signs that meant Exit, hit the green button, almost rain over someone, then off down the road I went.  I had to drive a bit before the GPS signal came in, and TomTom knew where it was.  It picked itself up ok, and then I chose the work site in Waldbronn as my destination.

TomTom likes to tell you to do things you can’t do…like turn left, sometimes, it’s just not going to happen.  thankfully, you can ignore it and it’ll re-route fairly quickly and get you where you need to be.  I don’t know how many cloverleafs it’s made me drive through all parts of, but it’s done it several times.

On the A8 and toward Karlshue I headed.  The autobahn is under construction, so, there wasn’t much speeding.  Also, it was raining, and my car is 1.2l…so  I didn’t get much over 80mph.

I found the work site, then programmed in to find the hotel.  Hotel Krone (http://www.hotelkrone-waldbronn.de).  It was in the TomTom’s POI database, and I got to the hotel… no one at the hotel was speaking English.  There’s a girl here who does speak English, but,she is a student and is only here occasionally.  I was shown two rooms.. and I choose this one, because it has a balcony. [flickr]photo:2410475385[/flickr]

I fought falling asleep at 4:00pm CET and didn’t really do so great.  I went for a long walk, took a few showers… [flickr]photo:2410478979[/flickr] [flickr]photo:2410479797[/flickr] [flickr]photo:2410480913[/flickr] [flickr]photo:2411309504[/flickr] [flickr]photo:2411310226[/flickr]

I finally fell asleep around 10:30pm.

Friday, I had a hard time waking up.  I missed the hotel breakfast…so I went to work.  Got settled at work, have a desk, a phone, internet, plant access, got lunch (tillapia, yumm!) and met a lot of people.  We went for a walk after lunch…not too much happened…other than I didn’t get any money from the ATM I tried.

…and since I’ve written a lot already..I’ll stop here.