Advertisement
Published: June 27th 2018
Edit Blog Post
After waking and getting myself sorted for the day, I walked to Nyhavn for breakfast. I stopped to take a photo of #20, which was the house that Hans Christian Andersen lived in. After a nice breakfast of eggs & bacon, I continued my walk to enjoy some of the final sights of Copenhagen. The time soon came to check out of my hotel and head to the Central Train station for my trip to Hamburg.
The journey started off nicely with my seat not actually on the window, but I could see the view of the countryside fully, without interruption this time. After about 2 hours I needed to change trains at Fredericia, which is a town in Denmark. As we were getting close to the station, an announcement advised us that the train to Hamburg had been cancelled!
Ah, the joys of travel. There were many people impacted by this event and after trying to speak to someone on the station, we finally worked out that we had to head outside and wait for the replacement bus. Unfortunately, due to the carriage I was in on the previous train, I ended up at the back of the
line for the bus. It was quite a warm day, especially standing in line in the sun.
Finally a double decker bus pulled up but I knew I had no hope of getting on that one. Sure enough, it filled up and left the 60+ of us standing there, wondering what next. The man from the company, who was very calm under pressure (and by pressure, I mean answering questions in multiple languages!), assured us all that another bus was on the way and not to worry as there were more seats on this bus than people waiting. After more than 20 mins the next big double decker bus arrived and we all started moving forward to load our luggage and be on our way. When it got to the couple in front of me, the driver advised that he could fit no more bags on the bus!!! So, we had to wait for another bus to arrive ?
It seems that spending extra money on a first class ticket doesn't help at all in this situation. A bus eventually arrived but not until more than an hour standing in the sun, waiting. As annoyed as I was
I really felt for others, especially those that had little children or had now missed their connection in Hamburg. Finally we were on our way although this bus was only taking us to a train station inside the German border where we had to get a regional train. My friend Christiane was going to meet me at the Hamburg Central train station at 6:15 and I had managed to send her a message when I was in Fredericia to let her know the train was cancelled but hadn't been able to message her since, so I was worried about that.
By the time I got the regional train in Flansburg, I knew I wasn't going to arrive in Hamburg before 8:15pm. So this whole saga cost me 2 hours but apart from the time, that was all I lost.
Once I arrived in Hamburg HBF I found some wifi and quickly sent Christiane a message. She sent me her address and I caught a taxi to her place. It was cold and raining when I arrived but was lovely to finally get to her place.
Christiane made me a gin & tonic on arrival and had also prepared a typical German dinner - all sorts of sausages with pickles, cheese and bread. Perfect! Just what I needed. Christiane has a beautiful apartment and it is very nice that I can stay with her for 2 nights.
We had a couple of beers and spent the time catching up. I met Chris on my tour of Japan and we had kept in touch ever since.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.243s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 12; qc: 61; dbt: 0.0768s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb