Berlin-Paris-Washington DC

Getting around Berlin is familiar now and the metro to the bus to the airport was relaxed. 

Despite the rosy picture on the Tegel Airport website, they were canceling flights to Amsterdam and north and there was a line of people rebooking their flights.   Fortunately, we were flying through Paris.  But some of the people got rebooked to our flight which was pretty crowded. 

Leaving Berlin.

I don't remember an airport so huge.  And it seemed we taxied all the way around it including past this Concorde.  (Wikipedia doesn't tell us the size of the airport.  A Google search says that the largest airport is King Fahd International in Damman, Saudi Arabia at 780 square kilometers.  Most sites then list the busiest airports.)

And there was a lot of walking to catch the plane on to Washington DC.

There are flights going all over the world from Paris.  And planes were flying to some of those Northern locations that had been canceled earlier in Berlin. 

We had to go past all the duty free shops.

But eventually we found our terminal and flew out over Paris.  We did see the Eiffel Tower from the plane and I think it is in this picture (upper right), but it's just not clear at all. 

And Dulles Airport outside of DC was pretty socked in.  We had instructions to take a taxi or the public bus.  The bus turned out to be the right choice.  It was after traffic time and it only made a couple of stops before dropping us off at L'Enfant Plaza Metro station.

It was a good day.  We had breakfast with our daughter, who also went to the airport with us, and we got to see our son in the evening.  We also bumped into someone we know from Anchorage changing trains in the Metro!