In Houston; On My Way to San Antonio

Friday, Sept. 26, 2014--Yerevan, Armenia to Vienna, Frankfurt, Houston, and San Antonio

It's been a LONG day of travel with rushing through two of the airports.  But both my luggage and I have made it so far!!

We were delayed leaving Yerevan.  They require a fingerprint as you go through immigration and customs.  That wasn't much of a problem.  But they required a fingerprint AGAIN as we showed our boarding passes at the gate.  That really slowed things down, because it takes the scanner a long time to detect an acceptable print.  We probably left Yerevan about 25 minutes later than scheduled strictly due to the fingerprinting.

That got us to Vienna late.  We were loaded onto buses and taken to the terminal.  From the time we got to the terminal, I had only 20 minutes before my flight to Frankfurt left.  I RAN!  I had to go through immigration control for the Schengen Group.  Then I had to run past about 30 gates to get to mine.  I arrived with about 5 minutes to go before departure.

In Frankfurt, I had to go through immigration control again to EXIT the Schengen Group.  Then I had to go past about 65 gates to get to mine.  When I got there, they were boarding the plane, but it wasn't as rushed as it was in Vienna.

Here in Houston, things went fairly well.  Their new electronic machines for going through immigration failed just as I had all my data entered.  All of us at those machines had to then line up to go through regular processing at the booths.  It was very disorganized and some regular passengers through here were fussing to the authorities about how long they have been having trouble.  Anyway, I made it through and was really rather surprised to find my bag on the luggage carousel.  I wasn't sure it had made the connections in either Vienna or Frankfurt.

I'm at the gate in Houston now awaiting my flight to San Antonio.  It's been about 21 hours since my flight departed Yerevan.  This last segment leaves in 1 hour and will be in San Antonio in 2 hours.  So I will have been traveling for 23 hours.  That's rather fast for such a distance and so many airports.  That's why I was having to run to make those connections.

It's good to be back in Texas.  I have to deal with getting everything up and running here again--buy food, get a haircut, get my car serviced, get my internet service reconnected, etc.  Plus, I will go to northeast Texas for 3 days next week.  Therefore, it will be a busy period for the next week.

Spending Update:  I averaged spending $48.06 per day during the 67 days of the entire trip.  That's a little over a dollar more than Wes and I averaged spending each during the time we were together.  That's quite cheap considering how nice the apartments and hotels tended to be and that I was travelling in Europe.