It didn’t feel like good luck, when the alarm went off at 4am.
We stayed last night in a hotel across the street from the station in Kolding, only because it’s the nearest place to Legoland in Billund with a station. An early night for all (7:30-8pm boys, 9pm for us) with a reasonably sensible start to our epic 25-hour, 5-train, homeward journey, seemed sensible.
As an afterthought, right before bed, I checked the Deutche Bahn website to see what our connections were all like, and the facilities on the trains, that sort of thing. We had reservations for all the trains, so we were pretty happy that we wouldn’t be sat on the floor at all on the way home.
Our journey showed up as “Extremely high load expected”, making me all the more glad that we’d got reservations… but there was something else…
A little link in the description said “Important information is in the details”, which I hadn’t seen before. The important information turned out to be that ICE14 from Köln – Bruxelles MIDI, critical for us to catch our Eurostar, was cancelled. Every day, for several weeks. The decision to cancel it was made public the day after we made our reservations, and there was no alternative connection which would have let us get our Eurostar… the only option we had was to start two hours earlier, and re-do the reservations.
Fortunately we could do that, and the non-refundable €11.80 was an annoyance, as was the inability to reserv seats on one of the trains, and the extra connection, and the early start… but we could make it at least. We did a bit more packing so there was less to do in the morning, and set our silly alarms.
I’m still astonished that they didn’t email us about the change, especially since they did, a few hours after we set off, send us an email to say that the new train we’d be on from Hamburg to Köln had changed, and gave us new reservations for the different seat layout there. Of course, not until I’d already made fresh reservations myself, having found that out from obsessively checking the DB website all morning… so that’s 4 sets of reservations for one journey 🙄
On the bright side, we’re coming in to Köln now, all is going fine, and we should make it. I should have planned a little differently, and got us to Hamburg last night so that we’d have more options today… but lessons learned.
I’m relaxing 4000 weeks at the moment, and as I got the email about the updated reservations, I was reading a chapter about the futility of being too perfectionist about plans. No matter how much you plan ahead to get to the airport on time, you can never guarantee that it’ll work out as you want it to, and seeking that certainty prevents you from making the most of your time. I should have read that last night!
Three trains down, three to go; wish us luck!
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