Not sure I’ll have enough Internet connectivity throughout this trip to blog every day, but gonna give it a shot:
Well, Saturday began a two-week trip with my Dad to Europe / Asia for an 11-day cruise of the Baltic Sea on the Regal Princess. The first two days have been all about travel. This included flights from Nashville to Atlanta, Atlanta to Amsterdam, and Amsterdam to Copenhagen. It was hard to leave my girls in Nashville, but I’m excited about my first trip to Europe and Asia, and especially excited about two weeks with my Dad. This group from Wilson Bank & Trust has 48 people and it is nice to have a tour director who is taking care of everything.
We left Nashville around 4:00pm and arrived in Atlanta around 6:00pm. Our original KLM flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam was cancelled so we were moved to an earlier Delta flight. This resulted in some chaos in Atlanta getting new boarding passes and our group being scattered all over the plane. We met up with Patsy and Ben (my sister and brother-in-law) in Atlanta, and somehow they got bumped to first class on our flight to Amsterdam. That’s a pretty awesome time to be in first class!
The flight left Atlanta at 8:30pm and was almost 8 hours long. I was hoping to get some sleep on the plane, but this didn’t turn out so well. I brought an inflatable travel pillow, but found out early that it had a hole in it. Watching Avengers: Age of Ultron made the time pass more quickly, but I also ended up starting Iron Man 3 in the latter part of the flight, and we landed before the movie finished. The in-flight meals were pretty meh, but at least we got some food.
Since Amsterdam is 6 hours ahead of Atlanta, it was already 11:00am on Sunday when we landed. This felt like going through a time warp, and I’m sure it will be even worse on the way home. I was surprised that we did not have to fill out any immigration forms, and the process of getting through immigration was extremely simple. I now have my first ever European stamp in my passport!
Our layover ended up being almost 7 hours, and I found the airport to be very interesting. Not sure what I was expecting, but it was extremely Americanized. Every sign was in English, and every worker I encountered at the airport or at retail spoke fluent English. I spent quite a bit of time walking around and had coffee at Starbucks (my usual caramel macchiato) and dinner at Burger King (long chicken sandwich and chocolate milkshake). I was able to text a little bit with Olivia and the girls, which was nice.
The KLM flight to Copenhagen, Denmark was originally supposed to leave at 5pm, but was delayed by 40+ minutes due to a thunderstorm and high winds. We landed just before 7pm with sunny skies.
Unfortunately our luggage did not arrive with us, so we spent a long time in the Copenhagen airport waiting in lines and filling out forms. Patsy and Ben continued their string of good luck by being the only two members of the group to get their bags. Hopefully we’ll get them before boarding the cruise on Tuesday afternoon. Thankfully I have enough clothes and toiletries to make it a few days. I talked to the girls for a few minutes while waiting for the bus to the hotel, and it was great to hear their voices.
We boarded a motor coach to the Crown Plaza Copenhagen Towers in Ørestad around 9pm. After checking in, a small group of us had a very nice worship service in one of the rooms before heading downstairs for a late dinner. Daddy and I split a “Great Burger” and fries, which seems kinda funny that we travelled all this way and are still eating American food.
Tomorrow we have a full day tour of the area and then hopefully will take a shuttle to old Copenhagen tomorrow night. Ready for some sleep tonight.