I am both looking forward to and a little anxious about the trip. While I fully realize that when we travel, I do most of the planning, Kathleen keeps me on course. She’s the one I look to when I want to know if I have forgotten anything. She notices when I have dropped something. She takes care of me in many little ways. I won’t have that on this trip. And as I told her yesterday, I remember from my old days of traveling alone for business that the worst part of traveling alone is having to drag everything with you when you do anything, like using a restroom or going into an airport shop.
Change of venue. After finishing up and kissing Keeley goodbye, Kathleen took me into Redmond, where I caught the brand-new light rail train to SeaTac. I wasn’t going to make Kathleen drive me all the way to the airport (a 90-minute round trip) without the carpool lane on the way home. And it’s Labor Day weekend, and the traffic I saw from the train looked pretty bad.
To take the train, we drive about 10 miles from the house to downtown Redmond. From there, it costs me exactly $1 to cross Lake Washington, transfer in Seattle, and head south to the airport. What a deal. The ride was good, but I am glad I boarded at the end of the line, since there were both a Mariners game and a Huskies game in Seattle. By the time we reached the International District station, where I changed trains to head south, it was packed.
As I write this, I am at the airport. It’s fun to fly an airline with only one daily flight from SEA. No lines. I walked up to the desk, asked a question, and headed to the lounge near the gate. I am flying Scandinavian Airlines, also known as SAS. We have never flown with them before, but they were the best option I could find. I have also never flown from here to Copenhagen, but that’s SAS’s home, so that’s where we are going.
This air travel experience wasn’t my usual one. Because Scott announced the workshop in mid-June, I had to buy my ticket three and a half months before the flight. Normally, I buy refundable tickets 11 months out, check them constantly, and re-ticket if the price drops. I did a bunch of searches in June, and this was the best price and schedule I could find. There were just a couple of things I didn’t like. First, the workshop ends with a late lunch on Friday, and our hotel rooms are good until Saturday morning. So I planned to fly back to Copenhagen on one of the first morning flights and then fly home. But if I did that on Saturday, the price went up by $1,200 compared to flying on Sunday. So I booked a hotel room near Copenhagen Airport, and I will fly up from Brussels on Saturday, spend the night, and come home a week from today.
The other thing I was unhappy about was that SAS wanted $480 for me to pick my seat before the flight. I passed on that because I am in business class, and how bad can it be? There are no middle seats. When I checked in yesterday, I found that I had been assigned a single-side window seat in row nine. Since row nine is the last row in business class, I will get off first. I am thrilled with that because I have a one-hour and 45-minute connection in Copenhagen. That seems like a long time, but I haven’t been to Europe since the new EES (Entry/Exit System) was instituted, which means that when I land in Copenhagen, I have to go through that process, including having my fingerprints scanned and my picture taken. If you have not entered the EU since it started, you will need to do that next time you go.
I have read online that the Danish are better at this than most other countries because their airport is smaller and they are more efficient. We have a WhatsApp text thread, and the people who flew in today and yesterday flew nonstop into Brussels from the US East Coast. Their wait time for EES was more than two hours. I won’t have to do that at all because I will have cleared it all in Denmark.
I really don’t want to miss my Brussels flight because we have a class dinner tomorrow night at 6:30 to kick off the class, and I would hate to miss it. After I land in Brussels, I have to take a train for about 70 minutes to Bruges. (BTW: It has been determined that it can be spelled Bruges or Brugges. I will try to stick to Bruges because my Mac has a limited number of Gs.) I already have my train ticket, and the station is on the airport’s lower level, so I should be OK.
I will have a full report for you tomorrow on how the flights went, maybe with pictures, since I have never flown SAS before. Their business class looks very nice in all the videos I’ve seen on YouTube. It will also be my first time flying the Airbus A350 (the equivalent of the 787), and I love flying on a new plane and a new airline. Always something to report on.
You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy plane tickets, which is kind of the same thing.” —Rick Steves