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The day had come - our return flight was due today. So we got up really early - at 4 a.m. the alarm clock was ringing. Anyway it wasn't too hard to get out of bed. The bags were stored in the car quickly; we checked out and drove towards the airport. As an advantage of the early hour the streets were quite empty, and we arrived at the airport within 30 minutes.

We returned our rental car - finally we had travelled a distance of 4.167 miles. We took the AirTrain to the terminal and checked in. The bag's weight were all OK, no complications here. After check in we had sufficient time for some breakfast and a Starbucks coffee.

Even the security check was left behind easily, without 'beeps'. We went to our gate and spent the remaining time with some reading or watched the incoming and departing flights. We boarded on time, a short time later we were on the way to the runway. Clearance to start - but what was this? Abruptly the turbines went down and the plane stood still. Then the captain announced that the start was aborted due to the tower's order because there was some object on our runway - if it was a car or even another plane we didn't get to know anymore. Quoting the captain from a later announcement: 'The tower said it's not a good idea to take off now...'

But finally we took off towards Dallas/Fort Worth. The flight route led over the greater Reno area, Pagosa Springs, Albuquerque and Amarillo - say a big part of the tour we did on the ground. We arrived in Dallas a few minutes early - wasn't too bad as we had only 40 minutes until the connection flight. So we were one of the lasts boarding before taking off absolutely on time, target Frankfurt. The meals on board were 'delicious' as usual - well, we had worse ones already. But even better ones.

During the night flight we all took a nap so we were relatively relaxed when landing 40 minutes early in Frankfurt. Passport check, grab our bags - all were arrived without damage - and pass the customs, and now? Being that early has also disadvantages, because now we had clearly more time until the booked train to Nuremberg would depart. But we even got over with this.

On time the train left the Frankfurt airport station. As on the very first day of our vacation not absolutely without difficulties - some kilometers before reaching Aschaffenburg the train was halted because of a failure of a switch... 21 minutes late we went on again - great if you have exactly 21 minutes for changing trains later on! Fortunately the train could catch up a little, so we finally had 4 minutes in Nuremberg to board the urban railway. 30 minutes later we arrived at home again.