travels, races, and other musings

Copenhagen to Austin We woke up at 3:15 AM to be out the door by 3:45 AM to make it to the airport at least two hours early for our 7:25 AM flight. Yay. While I was finishing up the last of the packing, Roger said that we had an email from British Airways. Our flight was delayed by two hours. We all piled back into bed with our clothes on and set an alarm for two hours later.  We woke up (again) at 5:45 and hauled our stuff to the train station. There was a 6:27 train to the airport so that worked out really well. We were at the airport by 6:50 but the checkin wasn’t open and things were confusing because they had us stand in a line to “rebook” us and I kept telling them we didn’t need to rebook and I finally heard them letting other people check in for our flight and I asked why we couldn’t and she said, “well, we need to rebook you because you’ll miss your connection.” I explained that, no, we wouldn’t, as our connection wasn’t until 11:45 AM so then she finally let us check in a...

Copenhagen For our final morning in Copenhagen, I booked us a time slot for Rosenborg Castle. Timed entry is required for this castle, even with a Copenhagen card. It didn’t cost anything and I just had to show verification of our timed entry upon arrival and then our Copenhagen cards. I chose the first slot at 10 AM when they opened and it was absolutely the right call. We practically had the place to ourselves and by the time we were leaving, the place was starting to get really busy.  We spent about an hour at Rosenborg and we all agreed that we liked it better than Christianborg. So if you are ever in Copenhagen and you only have time for one castle, pick Rosenborg. It’s older and somewhat smaller, but still really impressive and beautiful in its own way. There’s also a vault in the basement with an impressive array of royal…stuff, including the crown jewels of Denmark. I have pretty mixed feelings these days about crown jewels (colonizers, yay…) but they were still interesting...

Copenhagen Nobody slept particularly well. The beds weren’t super comfortable and the room temperature wasn’t quite right. I always sleep well on the ship but this bed just didn’t feel right. It was like sleeping on a trampoline. Every time Roger moved, I felt every little tiny adjustment like a ripple across the bed. It was awful.  So we slept in a bit and got up around 8 AM and went down to breakfast which was included at the hotel. It was a decent breakfast, actually. Many things about the hotel were great, like how close it was to the central train station. We hopped on the metro and went to get tickets for the 10 AM canal boat tour. I had purchased the Copenhagen Card prior to the trip. With the card we paid around $300 for the three of us for three days to have unlimited public transportation and entrance into just about every museum, castle, and attraction you could imagine in and around Copenhagen. We probably saved close to $100 by using the Copenhagen card as opposed to ...

Disembarkation and Copenhagen  In the Caribbean we like second seating dinner but in Europe we prefer first seating. A lot of people are the opposite. This, unfortunately, means early breakfast on disembarkation day. No thanks! We spoke with our serving team and they told us they had an open table in their second seating and we could come for later breakfast. So we slept in and went to breakfast in Animator’s at 8:15. After that we waited to get off the ship. And waited. Apparently passport control was really backed up and they were holding us (growing pains again, apparently). Many people in our cruise group complained about what a mess disembarkation was.  We finally got off the ship and made the short walk to the city bus stop and found a bus there waiting. Only a couple other families were taking the city bus. We got to the metro station and found the train and took it to the central station in Copenhagen. Our hotel was only about a 5 minute walk from there. We dropped off...