October 8th – 10th, 2013

Have you ever realized after doing something that you’re a complete idiot? I mean just downright stupid and you hate yourself for doing it but feel that because you’ve displayed such lack of intelligence that you probably deserve the suffering that you’re experiencing? I felt like a monumental idiot after planning our commute from Honolulu to Warsaw. While Anjli won’t confirm my feelings, I know in her heart, she concurs 😉 Let me explain.

Our commute from Honolulu to Warsaw included 4 flights, averaging 6 hours each, an 8 hour bus ride, a 2 hour ferry ride and finally an 8 hour drive in a rental car. Not to mention a night’s stay in the Polish version of the hotel from Jack Nicholson’s The Shining.

We left Oahu on a flight headed for LAX on the night of Oct 8th, arriving in LAX on the morning of the 9th (my birthday). We spent much of my birthday on the flight from LAX to JFK and the Delta lounge at JFK Terminal 4. Took a luxurious shower at the lounge, followed by Vueve Cliquot and gelato! #balleronabudget

Our next leg was from JFK – LHR, The plane was completely empty and Anjli and I grabbed a middle row each and slept most of the way to LHR. How in the world was the leg between the two busiest airports in the world so empty is something we didn’t understand but didn’t complain about either! The sweet flight attendant brought us some chocolate cake for my birthday! 🙂

While the stop over at LHR was fairly long, there was a lot going on! We had to make sure Anjli could check-in for the flight to CPH without much hassle. She’s still a FOB, you see 🙂 What I mean is she has the Indian passport and needed a UK visa to easily go to landside to check-in for our flight which was on a different itinerary. Long story short – we checked into the new terminal only to discover that the lounge we had access to was at the previous terminal. Worst airport ever!

In all the hustle bustle, I booked us on a bus to Berlin from Copenhagen for the wrong date! There was some weird rental car rules in the area about which city you could rent a car from which dictated which borders you could cross, so we planned to rent a car from Berlin to drive into Poland. So there we were, 7 hours later, walking through a dark alley in downtown Copenhagen at 6am trying to find the bus leaving on that morning, hoping we could convince the bus driver to let us on the bus. We were fortunate and 2 seats opened up. Here’s Anjli giving the thumbs up celebrating after the bus started moving.

The bus drove for 3 hours from Copenhagen to a town on the south coast of Denmark called Gedser, from where we hopped a ferry to Rostock, Germany. Running on fumes of sleep, Anjli and I Indulged in the breakfast buffet on the ferry. The food was delicious and we even pocketed a couple of sandwiches for our drive to Warsaw.

Anjli promptly proceeded to pass out after the meal.

After two hours on the ferry, we arrived in Rostock, Germany, a small port town on the north coast of Germany.

Just a beautiful European city.

Surprisingly, we did not have to go through immigration as Germany and Denmark are both a part of the Schengen area. We hopped back on the bus and went straight to Berlin.

After 3 hours of hassling with the different car companies at the Berlin airport, we finally had a car and were on our way to Warsaw. After we crossed the border in to Poland and had driven about 300 KM, I really started to feel the jetlag, Anjli forced me to pull in to a truck stop and we checked in to a shady looking hotel that had all the lights turned off and was just down right creepy. While walking to our room, I seriously thought Jack Nicholson would be waiting for us with an axe around every corner.

But for 30 Euro, we got a clean bed and breakfast in the morning.  We drove the remaining 230 KM to Warsaw to meet our friend Zbig and were greeted by his cats Kobuz, Lenka and Dominic. Here’s a picture of Anjli and Kobuz

Moral of the story, keep your travel schedule as simple as possible. sometimes it’s worth the extra few hundred dollars to reduce total travel time. Still, I feel like we had some interesting adventures along the way. Anjli may disagree though.

Til next time.

Cheers,

-Rajat