the price of S U P E R on the economy

I keep repeating myself. We are running out of time.

Looking at the months we have left in Europe and the places we need to see, I am not sure there are enough weekends to fit it all in. But, we are going to try!

We could have moved back without going to Poland again, but why? I am the only one who has gone, and really wanted to go back with Jim.

Last week, the boys were out of school on Friday which also means I was off work. It was a good day to make a trip somewhere.

We decided a day or two before for Jim to take the day off and make a quick trip. 
With the boys starting basketball in December, we know open weekends off are soon to be filled up.
Ty had to work on Friday, so we had a cute girl come over to babysit.

With Ty finally driving- the problem with transportation is solved. A beautiful thing.


Poland is super cheap. We could have done a 24-hour trip again, but decided to spend the night instead. Our room was not fancy, and the bed was not comfortable, but for around $50 {including breakfast} we were fine. 

We left Mackenbach about 3:30am and drove straight to Boleslawiec- the beautiful town of ceramics. North east of our house, we drove through Dresden {a city I would love to spend more time in} and just over the border into Poland.

Our destination was slightly south east of Berlin- another city on our list.
No police stops this trip {Jim was driving}, but we did have Esso station issues.

We carefully mapped out where the last Esso station in Germany was in order to avoid paying for gas on the economy or in Poland.

Before filling up, I went in and asked the ladies at the gas station if they would take our Esso card- pre-loaded with $ which allows us to receive our rationed price.

They were not sure if it would work or not, so we decided to just test it with 5 Euro before filling up our whole tank.

I'm not sure what part she did not understand, but as soon as I tried to run our card to pay the 5 Euro, she realized they would take our card and told us to finish filling up. I tried to pay the 5 Euro, but she reassured me that it was fine- go fill up.

Unfortunately, because we had two transactions, it would not go through. So frustrating. She told us to figure it out when we got back to Ramstein. We ended up having to pay {economy price} right there.

Price to fill up was a whopping 94 Euro, which is $131.50.
Ouch.

Fortunately, Esso made it right and after filling out a dispute {once we returned to the base}, they approved it and refunded us the difference.

In order to do this, they go back to that day and figure out the price of gas.

Convert the euro to dollar rate that day based on the euro.
Subtract what we should have paid {our rationed price} from what we paid. The bottom line shocked us. If the transaction had been done properly, we should have paid $58.61.

A huge difference {our refund} of $72.89 on one tank of gas- more than it cost us to fill up. Wow.
At least we had a full tank of gas and were on our way to a full day of shopping and togetherness.