11 October

For a full list of all trip photos, click here. For more on the technical specs behind these photos, click here. For the text entry that accompanies these photos, click here.

My last morning of the tour, slowly making my way to the airport after saying goodbye to Dirk and Sonja. This is a U-Bahn, one of many trains that make up the sometimes maddening German rail system. (Click here for a little guide to the German rail system, illustrated with photographic examples from this trip.) U-Bahns are very similar to the normal city train system here in America, like Chicago's el, New York's subway, or the San Francisco BART system; they travel both aboveground and below, radiate off into a series of 5 to 20 lines, and make stops that are usually half a mile to a mile apart, relying on buses and trams to cover the smaller distances in between.

Panoramic shot! My last of the tour - a full 360-degree view of the city of Frankfurt, as seen from the historic and also very modern Hauptwacheplatz. Ah, Frankfurt - I miss you already. (Click on the photo or here for the full-sized [800-pixel] version; or here for a special page displaying just the panoramic shots I took during my trip.)

And now a shot from an S-Bahn, which are much more like suburban train systems here in America - older trains, bigger, that travel from city to city but only within a 20, 30-mile radius from the main city (Frankfurt in this case), with only one station in each suburban city but a whole variety of them within the main one (usually sharing track space with U-Bahns, making for a system of easy transfer spots within the city). These go just far enough on their routes to have First and Second Class sections, but not far enough to have smoking sections or cafe cars, like the R/REs and IC/ICEs; also, the S-Bahns (as well as Us, busses and trams) are run by that particular city's transit system, while the R/RE/IC/ICE trains are run by Deutsche Bahn, the national rail company. Whew!

Yet another of Germany's "smoking stations," this one in the Frankfurt Airport. Germans bitch about these stations, because they're a reduction from the recent "smoke wherever the hell you want" policy that's been in place for centuries here; as an American, though, I was amazed I could smoke indoors anywhere, so loved the little stations (which, lets face it, you still find every 100 feet or so in German public buildings, so it ain't like it's exactly inconvenient to smoke even with the new restrictions).

Next five photos: Just some random shots of the Air India 747 I rode in back to Chicago, as well as some shots from out the window (showing Greenland, if I'm not mistaken, but I could very well be mistaken - those ten-hour flights make my brain all weird, man).

"Are you a terrorist? Are you SURE you're not a terrorist? Do you have a bomb in your luggage? Are you SURE you don't have a bomb in your luggage? Can we have your fingerprint? Can we have a blood sample? Will you please remove all your clothes in preparation for genetic testing? Oh, and welcome back to America. Are you absolutely SURE you're not a terrorist?"

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