This morning we awoke again at 3:30 a.m. Not sure when we will get over that nonsense, but at least it allows us to "sleep in" (stay in bed) and still be out and about before any of the other tourists. Before we left this morning, we FaceTimed with Eric and Triann Benson. That was a hoot! We teased back and forth and generally enjoyed speaking English to someone other than ourselves for a while. :)

Then we ate a quick breakfast of bread, turkey and an apple each and then set out to do some geocaching . This was the real deal, I tell you. Bryan was navigating us through an unfamiliar town, without Internet service to update our info, and the description and hint were "encoded" in German! We were successful, and able to drop off a trackable item we had picked up from a cache back in the states.

Then we wandered back into old town and enjoyed having the place to ourselves. We found a little cafe and Bryan had a hot chocolate and surfed the Internet while I had a peppermint tea and wrote some in my journal. Having relaxed as much as we wanted, we paid our bill and went back to the hotel.

After we packed up our things we had a quick Skype chat with Aaron Lane. Once again it was great to speak English with a friendly face. You don't realize how much effort communicating can be until you get the ease of a normal conversation. We checked out by about 10 a.m. The man at the reception office mentioned that we had a German name . Bryan said that he felt like he belonged here (dinner did him wonders) and so the man said, "I speak to Herr Schmidt in German" and proceeded to rattle off a number of things we didn't understand. By the end all three of us were laughing. Good times.

We went to the ticket window at the train station next to get help booking our route to Reutte. Now, the way we've been saying "Reutte" is like to "root" for your favorite team. The young man at the ticket counter didn't recognize where we wanted to go. Then he finally ventured a guess and it starts with a funny sound in the back of your throat, almost like Hoyt-ah. I tried to say it correctly and we all had a good laugh. We may not know their language, but everyone at least seems very good natured about it. :)

And that is it. Now we are on a train that will take us to Garmish, Germany. Then we will make a quick connection (they time them for regular commuters, so they are about 5 or 6 minutes long, is all) to the train that will take us to Reutte.

Having the ability to so easily communicate back home was just awesome. We really enjoyed using our iPad to talk with people. As Merilee mentioned, dealing with the language barrier can be really tiring. It was really refreshing to be able to share our stories with friends and speak in relaxed English for a while. I think that was a good part of why we never really got homesick in our 6 weeks of traveling.