Over this past summer, my 2 brothers and I went to Europe on vacation for about a week or so to Dublin, London, and Amsterdam. This was especially fun for me, as I had never left the country prior to that point. I had barely even been off the east coast more than a handful of times before then, actually. The trip itself was beyond incredible; every second I spent in each city was eye opening. But the real reason this trip will always be memorable to me came when we were on the way home from our last stop of the trip in Amsterdam. Long story short, due to some error checking into the airport, we weren’t able to make it onto our plane home and had to embark on a 40+ hour journey across the European countryside to make it back home to the US. To preface, this situation was far from fun at the time and caused a lot of stress, but I think it’s far enough in the past to be funny at this point. It was a comedy of errors
To start the journey off, we woke up around 9am local time in the Netherlands to go get a quick bite to eat before heading to Schiphol Airport for our flight back to the US. When we arrived at the airport, however, we ran into a problem that we weren’t even aware was occurring. As we got to security, we were unsure of which terminal we were supposed to enter to get to our gate, so we asked a woman at the security desk which way to go. She didn’t say anything back, just pointed towards a smaller security gate to the auxiliary terminals. So, we went through, got some food, and waited for our flight. But when the time came to board, we couldn’t find our gate. Eventually, we figured out we were in the wrong terminal entirely, and that the woman we had asked either sent us to the wrong terminal or we misunderstood what she had meant. And what’s worse, our gate was 20 minutes away, but the flight left in 5. In summary, we missed it. And because we flew on the most budget airlines to save money on the trip, we couldn’t make up the flight at all. We were panicking, because the cheapest seats we could find on flights home out of Schiphol were all in the realm of ~$1000. However, we found an airline in Denmark that could get us home for only a couple hundred dollars. So, we decided to go to Denmark. Low on money already given the situation, we had to hop on the European equivalent of a Greyhound bus to get there in what culminated to be a 16+ hour bus ride across the countryside of the Netherlands and Germany. In the middle it got kind of sketchy, when we had to wait for a connecting bus in Hanover, Germany, at a local bus terminal with nowhere to stay from just after midnight to sunrise. We ended up sleeping on some benches nearby. Eventually, we made it to Copenhagen, and made sure to do everything right to get on our flight home. And when we did make it on, I realized we were flying on a 787, so I was ecstatic to say the least. 10 hours later and we’re in New York, thankfully. But we still have to drive another 5 hours back home to D.C. All in all, we were non-stop travelling for around 46-48 hours. I had to work a good few extra shifts to recoup my losses, but I was beyond happy to have gotten back regardless.