The Amazing Race

View Journey across Europe in a larger map
I tried to make a map showing all the cities mentioned so you get an idea.  I'm not sure if I did it right, but the cities are on there.

Angela and I finally did it.  The amazing race.  No, we weren't racing against other teams, for a million dollars, and Phil was not there to hug at the end.  But we were racing.  I'll try to make this as short as possible.  However, if it ends up too long and you don't want to read it, or if the details don't make enough sense, here's the bottom line that I cannot emphasize enough:  Never use orbitz.com.  And don't say I didn't warn you. 

Our cruise was leaving out of Kiel Germany.  The Hamburg Germany and Sonderborg Denmark airports were equal distances away.  We chose to fly into Sonderborg because it was cheaper.  We were scheduled to fly roundtrip.
Salt Lake City to Dulles, DC
DC to Copenhagen
Copenhagen to Sonderborg

Well, when we arrived in DC we were informed the company flying our leg from Copenhagen to Sonderborg went out of business 3 weeks ago.  WHAT!?!?!?  We had about 20 minutes to get a hold of Orbitz and see if there was anything they could do to help us.  Their response:  No, they couldn't do anything, but good luck.  They were leaving us stranded in Copenhagen.  We asked them why they hadn't told us anything in the last 3 weeks.  They said they did, it was on the last confirmation.  Uh, I have the confirmation email they sent the day before, it still said we have a flight from Copenhagen to Sonderborg.  Classic he said she said, except that I have email proof that they didn't tell us anything.  They've been horrible to deal with and will accept no responsibility in the matter.  Including the part where they told us nothing of the change.  I cannot repeat this enough, DO NOT USE ORBITZ.

We arrived in Copenhagen and began racing.  We landed at 830 and our cruise is leaving at 5, and we have 248 miles to cover... we ended up getting a train that would barely get us to Kiel in time, ironically it was routed through Hamburg.  In retrospect, where we should have just flown into had we know Cimber Sterling and Orbitz were going to leave us high and dry in Copenhagen.  Long story short, with lots of running (seriously sweating) between planes, trains, and buses we made it to our ship.  28 hours of traveling.

We had to leave our cruise a day early because now that we had to take trains back to Copenhagen to catch our flight, we wouldn't have arrived in time.  At first I was disappointed because I felt like we were losing part of our trip.  In reality, we saw so much more as we traveled across the island of Bornholm across Sweden and back to Copenhagen.  Once there we had time to do more sight seeing in one of my favorite cities. 46 hours of traveling. 

Now that we are back, I've spent many hours (over 5) on the phone with Orbitz trying to get our money back for the flight we never got to take and which caused serious amounts of stress.  In spite of this major problem we had a great trip and I'll even admit I enjoyed the challenge of it.  It's all part of the freaking adventure.