And We're Off

The first legs of our journey take us to Copenhagen. We start off with a short flight down to Toronto. We spend three hours there finding our way around to the international departure gates and having a lunch at Tim Horton's—a last touch with Canadiana! Our flight is delayed, and then delayed again. Finally, they change airplanes from a Boeing 767 to an Airbus A340. Then they have to round up a different flight crew who know their way around an Airbus. Finally, we get boarded over an hour late. But we're in first class, and that makes all the difference. We relax our way through the night across the Atlantic to London, in our spacious digs. Imagine reaching out as far as you can with your feet, and not even coming close to the seat in front of you! Unfortunately, the flight ends about 2 am (body time) as we land at Heathrow. That's early morning in London, but not early enough. Our flight to Frankfurt leaves while we are trying to change terminals. We report to Lufthansa; they send us to Air Canada; they send us back to Lufthansa, who give us a new boarding pass to Frankfurt. This will be a lunch time flight instead of the morning flight we were expecting. They decline to give us another boarding pass for the trip up to Copenhagen. We'll have to check with Lufthansa when we get to Frankfurt and arrange that. Once in Frankfurt the wonderful connections counsellor advises us that all will be well, and even provides a gate number. When we get close to there we go to the check-in counter, and discover, as we feared, that our reservations for the leg up to Denmark were cancelled when we missed the scheduled flight to Frankfort. Eventually we are awarded new boarding passes on the original flight we were supposed to take in the first place! We arrive in the Danish capital in the early evening, and go to retrieve our luggage. Eventually three of the four pieces do show up. Our new Roots bag has a wheel broken loose, and our other wheeled bag is torn open, This must not be Africa—nothing is missing! The lovely lady at the luggage counter is very kind and helpful. She awards us a new bag—she has several for us to choose from—and takes note of the damage to the other one and invites us to claim for repairs. Then she tracks down the missing bag—it's still in Frankfurt, and promises to do all she can to get it to Copenhagen in time for us to take it with us to Africa. We manage to check-in for our Africa flight, sans one piece of luggage. Then we take the train into town, settle into our room at the Hotel Centrum, and try to catch up on the six time zones we've been flying over!