My travels to Germany took three days, the first day was by myself and the other two were with my friend Celeste who is in the picture above and is coming to Austria with me. I left from Calgary early on Friday morning and flew to Milwaukee via Toronto and Detroit to meet up with her. I’m actually really glad that I chose to travel this way over a few days, staying overnight at Celeste’s house for the first night because it broke up my travels and meant that I wasn’t quite as tired throughout the trip.
I arrived in Milwaukee around 9:30 on Friday night and was greeted by Celeste and her friend Abby who hung out with us that evening and the next morning. Saturday morning we got to sleep in and grab coffee and breakfast before we had to leave around 12:00 to drive to the Chicago Airport to catch our flight.
When we arrived at the airport we checked our bags, (with really expensive overweight fees, oops) and made our way through the extremely busy airport security, grabbed some food and went to our gate. The airline that we flew with was called Tap Air Portugal and we were both a bit nervous about it because neither of us had ever flown with them and the flights were really cheap so we were kind of unsure of how legit this airline would actually be. We also found out the day before that they had pushed our flight back an hour which meant that we would only have about a half our layover in Lisbon for our connecting flight. When we asked the flight attendant if we should be concerned about this and she said that it should be no problem as our flight would be leaving on time.
Well… she was wrong. They closed the gates on time but we taxied on the runway for about 45 minutes before taking off. This meant that our arrival time in Lisbon was now after the time that our connecting flight to Frankfurt was supposed to leave. That made for a pretty stressful flight and as a result neither Celeste or I slept very much. We arrived around 8:35 AM local time and as we suspected, our connecting flight had already left. Lucky for us, there was probably about 20 other people on our flight who had also missed their connections, so the airline was ready to re-book flights for a lot of people and they gave us tickets to a new flight about 6 hours later. As it turned out, we waited about an hour and a half in line at customs so even if our flight had been on time we still would have missed our connection because of how long the customs line was. Once we finally got through customs we just sat down at a table, hung out, and napped a bit until they released our gate number.
After that little hiccup, it was pretty much smooth sailing for the rest of our travels. We arrived in Frankfurt around 6:00 local time and were a bit unsure about how to go on from there because we had missed the train we booked previously, according to how our original flights were. Thankfully, when we landed we got a text from our friends Joe and Mari, (we are currently staying with Joe,) saying that they would come and pick us up from the airport. We were really thrilled because by this point we were so exhausted that we just wanted to sleep and were super not in the mood to re-book train tickets.
It’s now early in the morning of the second day that we are spending at Joe’s house in Asperg, Germany. We are planning to be here for a week until Sunday the 8th when we will make our way to Austria by train to start our new “job”. Jet lag is hitting pretty hard this morning for me as I’ve been wide awake since about 3:30 AM. Hopefully this means that I’ll be extra tired by tonight and then I’ll be able to sleep through the night. For the rest of the week we are planning to visit a few Christmas markets nearby and also visit some other friends from Holsby who live relatively close by, so we are super looking forward to the rest of this week!
Kelsi's Travel Times 