2023 Trip to Germany and the Netherlands with a Side of Belgium

Before I start on about today's adventures, I have to say being in a different time zone and having sleep mixed up is not great.  Case in point. We were so tired after our supper last night (leftover sangies), we went to bed.  I woke up around 9:30 and started working on the blog.  At 11:13 pm, Cathy woke up and asked what time it was.  I told her.  She got up, opened the black out curtains and said "It's still dark outside!".  What???  Took me a few minutes but then the light turned on.  She thought she'd slept through the night and it was 11:13 am.  We had a good laugh about it. We did fall asleep around 1 am.  I woke up about 5:30 but thought there is no way I'm getting up.  Stayed asleep until about 9:30.  Perfect.  We showered, separately, stop it!  What a lovely shower!  Fantastic water pressure and the spray covered all of you.  I've had showers where a quarter of your body is wet at a time.  hah...

      Some time in July or August my sister, Cathy, said she wanted to go to see the Christmas markets in Germany.  I asked her when she wanted to go.  Her answer was in December.  I asked if she was talking about this coming December.  She was!!  I was surprised but immediately game.  It has been just over a year since my last trip over to Europe but that didn't matter. No sooner had I jumped on the bandwagon, I realized it meant lots of planning - figuring out dates, trains, flights, hotels, what to see but most important where to go in Germany.  I've been there so many times, I had to find a city with history that I hadn't been to.  Pickings are getting very slim now.  I'm not bragging just stating fact.  For anyone that knows me, they know I love Germany so have gone there almost once a year for about 10 years now.  I decided we'd go to Dresden and Leipzig.  Both cities seem interesting and have ...

Departure day has finally arrived.  It is 5:30 am.  Cathy and I are heading to the airport in our car being driven by our chauffeur, Dave (also known as Cathy's husband). I tried to check in online yesterday.  No luck so I called Westjet. In a round about way, I was able to speak to a human but only after being on hold for over 30 minutes.  If you have to call Westjet, make sure you aren't in a hurry.  If you call and have booked through a travel agent, don't follow the instruction to press 1.  Instead press the number to speak to someone as if you booked directly with Westjet.  The online check in site was telling me my passport info with Westjet didn't match what KLM had.  It did but that didn't matter to a computer.  Also, I manually put Cathy's passport info in.  Got a message saying it had to be verified at the airport.  When I finally spoke to the person on the phone, she said th...