All I can say about this is that having a phone that works when you get off that plane can be priceless. My wife has been deployed (Navy) to Germany for 7 months now, and when I landed in Munich back in December to see her, I was *devastated* that the phone I brought with me (An old AT&T GoPhone I reactivated just for that trip since I bought the Imagio literally 2 days prior) was completely useless and couldn't even sent an IM let alone make a call, no matter what the morons at the AT&T store said. I couldn't figure out how to use the damn payphones [side note: just drop the leading "0" from a German cell phone # you might call from the US], and had absolutely no way of contacting my wife. Dumb luck prevailed and she was right there on a bench 10 feet from me when I slammed the Deutsche Telekom payphone receiver down for the final time in frustration, so it worked out. I'm man enough to admit that I was very close to tears at that point.
Long boring story short, I highly recommend you call Verizon and make sure you have
something that will work when you get there, be it a SIM unlock or International Roaming or whatever. It's not a good feeling to be thousands of miles from home and be completely disconnected when it matters most.
As a matter of fact, I'm going back there next week, time to hit verizonwireless.com and sign up for something that will work this time! I don't care how much it costs, it was really the absolute worst feeling in the world to be so suddenly and totally without a means of communication. How did people even live 5 years ago? Geez
