Day 1 - Friday, August 22 - Woodstock - Newark - Frankfurt

 We are finally off on our lower Danube cruise through Eastern Europe. We were supposed to go on this cruise in June 2021 but came down with Covid 3 days before departure and had to cancel suddenly.

We are taking the Viking pre and post cruise extensions to Istanbul and Prague. Makes for a long trip but we don't know when we would ever plan to go there separately.

A beautiful clear, sunny and not too hot day to start our trip.😁

We were relieved to reach the Lufthansa lounge for a beer, Bloody Mary and snacks after the trip down.

The traffic on the Garden State Parkway was very heavy and Google suggested getting off and driving through downtown Newark to the airport.

There was no TSA pre-check line for security at Newark and it took us about 40 minutes to get through. Now that passengers aren't required to remove shoes and belts I wonder if TSA pre-check is going away.

We didn't even have to show a boarding pass to get on the plane - just look into a camera that took a photo.

On the plane, the pilot announced that there would be some turbulence due to the hurricane. It wasn't the most encouraging when he said not to worry because the aircraft was designed to handle turbulence. It turned out just to be slightly bumpy for a few hours.


We actually change flights in Frankfurt, Germany


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