Pre-cruise – Sunday and Monday, 6/9 and 6/10 To Copenhagen

Just for some background, this was my tenth cruise, my wife’s eighth cruise and my step kids (daughter age 17 and son age 21) fourth cruise. I have previously cruised on Carnival and Royal Caribbean as well as Norwegian and have found them to be comparable in quality. This would be our first time in a suite on Norwegian Cruise Lines so I was eager to try out the suite life.

We left on Sunday, June 9 for the journey to Copenhagen. The trip actually almost did not happen though. Upon waking up I checked our first flight from DFW to Atlanta and it was delayed an hour which wasn’t good news at all. We had a 2 ½ hour layover in Atlanta before our next flight to London which was now reduced to only 1 ½ hours which was tighter but still doable. I checked the flight status an hour later and it was now delayed almost two hours and the layover in Atlanta was down to 40 minutes which was no longer doable and panic set in. My wife called American Airlines but they weren’t much help and we were advised to get to the airport as soon as possible. Thus we hurried and finished our last minute packing, loaded up the car and headed to DFW airport. The news at the check in counter was pretty grim as we were told that we could not make our connection in Atlanta (and certainly our luggage wouldn’t make it) and that there were no other flights available within the next two weeks which could get us to Copenhagen. I’ve never had this happen before so was in full panic mode. Would the trip be over before it even started? We talked to a second person at the check in counter and she helped us devise a game plan. There was an earlier flight to Atlanta that would give us plenty of time to make our connection but it was of course full. We could only fly standby and hope that all four of us made it on the flight. We waited at the gate as this earlier flight boarded and it seemed bleak (as the boarding was almost complete) when they called my name and amazingly they had four slots open for us (as we were first on the list of standby passengers on a list of 23 people waiting to fly standby on this flight). Thus, we flew from Dallas (DFW) to Copenhagen on American Airlines with a layover in Atlanta of 2 hours. Our next flight was from Atlanta to London Heathrow on British Air and things went much better with this flight. My wife and I got upgraded to World Traveler Plus for some unknown reason which meant lots of legroom, a larger screen to watch “on demand” movies, a foot rest, and a nice quiet cabin. It was a very relaxing flight. The kids said that the normal cabin was good too so all were happy. We had another 4 hour layover in London before our last flight from London to Copenhagen on British Air. We finally arrived in Copenhagen on Monday evening at 5:30 pm with all of our luggage amazingly intact! Read more