At last!

We leave for the big trip tomorrow with a mind-numbing 6 am car pickup from the house. I am so not a morning person. But perhaps this will help us all adjust to European time that much faster...

I'm not one to pack in advance so tonight will be a long night :) We're shooting to bring two suitcases to check (for the 4 of us) so I will be ruthlessly culling to ensure that everything fits. Thankfully there are laundry facilities throughout our entire trip so we won't have to repeat last year's experience, where I lugged a suitcase 500 metres through central Copenhagen and spent a thrilling morning doing 6 loads of laundry at the local laundromat. The laundromat's directions were all in Danish - with a complicated central payment system for a bank of numbered machines. I'm pretty sure I spent an unnecessary $20 or so trying to figure out the system before I got the hang of it. It didn't provide any refunds for my screw-ups either. The upside was that my laundry-enforced downtime allowed me to finally finish reading Tom Friedman's The World is Flat.

We used United miles for all our tickets for this trip, so our itinerary involves a few stops, a few airlines and quite a few hours of layovers. Wish us luck!