It is European vacation time! We decided to wait a little longer in the summer for our trip this year. We started our trip with our flight to Chicago before boarding our long-haul flight across the pond.
We ended up sitting next to a Kansas City-based rapper, Tech N9ne, during our flight to Chicago. He was so nice, and I should have asked him for a picture, but I didn't. He was delighted to hear that I listen to "Hood Go Crazy" while I run.
We arrived at O'Hare, and our first stop was the lounge for lunch and drinks.
Lounge cocktails
So happy to be on vacation together!
We flew from Chicago to Frankfurt on Lufthansa's Boeing 747-8, which features a double-decker area. We chose our seats on the upper deck because I thought it would be fun!
Cocktails waiting once we hopped on board the double-decker!
Cheers! Long-haul flight ready!
So excited to be heading to Champagne!
We landed in Frankfurt and had over two hours to make our connection, but for some reason, passport control was complete chaos. It became very obvious that we were going to miss our flight to Paris. We tried to book the next nonstop to Paris, but there was only one seat available. Geinus me thought, wow, we should take the train. Wrong. We learned the hard way that you must have a seat reservation to get to Paris, and the trains were completely full. We could get halfway there, but not all the way.
After a lot of back and forth, the very kind Lufthansa representative booked us to Paris via Frankfurt to Vienna and then to Paris. We were in for a long day, but thankfully, we had lounge access.
Everything seemed to go wrong on this day, including the security in Frankfurt. It took forever, and an older man asked to get in front of us because he was going to miss his flight. Well, guess who we saw in the lounge??? Perhaps he missed his flight and went to the lounge. We will never know.
Alas, we finally made it to Paris. With all the hiccups, the staff on both of the Austrian Air flights were absolutely amazing. They were the kindest airline staff we have ever encountered.
Once we landed in Paris, we took the metro to the Gare de l'East train station to board a train to Epernay. We ended up getting on the last train of the night, which arrived at midnight.
30 hours of traveling, and happy to be so close to Epernay!
When we arrived at our apartment in Epernay, we were delighted to find a bottle of champagne waiting for us in the refrigerator. I thought we would both pass out from being so tired, but we stayed up and had the bottle of champagne, recounting our day and just laughing.
Champagne at midnight! One for the memory banks!
While we made the absolute best of our extremely long travel day, I could really go without doing that again! Shout out to the Lufthansa and Austrian Air lounges because they were definitely the stars of the show and kept us from losing it!
