We arrived in Germany safely, but not Alan's laptop!

After a tour of US airports (SFO, SNA, ORD) on tickets redeemed from United Airline's MileagePlus REWARD program, we finally arrived at Frankfurt airport (FRA) some 20 hours later.

The German immigration officer (Polizei?) could not have been nicer.

Polizei: "How long are you going to stay?"
Alan: "A year. I plan to do physics research at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe."
Polizei: [While stamping our passports] "Enjoy your stay."

If a foreigner were to give the same response at any US, Canada, UK, NZ, Australian...border without a work permit, he/she would be spending at least an hour explaining the word "research" before getting bounced. Not to this Canadian/US family of four showing up without a work permit at a German entry point. We will get our resident permits next week once we have settled down.

We didn't lose any of our eight checked bags (despite the convoluted route). After the "limousine" driver loaded our bags onto the back of a VW van, we hit the autobahn at top speed and arrived at our flats at the FZK-Guesthouse in Karlsruhe about 80 minutes later. We have two single flats for the next few days until a large 2-room flat is available.

The only casualty of the trip was Alan's laptop, which was transported in his carry-on bag. The hard disk was dead (a sinister "invalid key length" error). Fortunately, he did a full backup before the trip; and a hard-disk reformat and three hours later, Apple's Time Machine software restored all his files.