60th European Adventures

 20 May I had booked our train journey from Roskilde to Mildam back in Australia.  The trip was nearly 12 hours and involved 6 trains and 5 changes of train!  In Denmark Thomas was able to find a much better, two train connection, but it was too late - the journey I'd booked couldn't be changed at all.   We had to be up at 5am to make sure we were at the Roskilde train station by 6.20am (we were there by 5.45!!) for our first train, to Ringstead St.  We had 37 minutes to change to our next train, departing at 7.32am for Hamburg. I was able to book seats for this leg and opted for first class.  So it was surprise to find our seats and discover they were occupied by a German couple.  They claimed their seats had been taken by someone else and they had found these "vacant" ones and now we had to sort it out.  Not the sort thing you expect to encounter in first class!  The man went off to find someone when we refused to go away (the other pa...

 16 May We had to get up at 3am to drive the 45 minutes to Reyjkavik International airport.  We had been advised that due to the Summit of the Council of Europe, the road to and from the airport would be closed, for up to an hour, but we couldn't find out if it would be at 4am or not... I thought that VIPs would not chose to fly in the middle of the night but just in case, we left earlier than we had too.  So we saw sunrise!  We worked out where the car hire depot was (4 minutes walk away!) and Greg dropped me off with the bags while he returned the car.  We had breakfast, and boarded our Play flight to Denmark, which left at 6.20am.  We arrived in Copenhagen at 11.30am local time. Arriving in Denmark, we took the train to Roskilde to meet up with our long time friends Thomas and Marianne. We first met Thomas and his mate Hendrick in 1986 (gasp - so long ago!) on an elephant trek in Thailand.  Something we probably wouldn't do now! We kept in touch - T...

 8 May We arrived into a very windy, wet and quite cold Reykjavik Airport.  There were now five of us: Fiona, Peter, Lucy, Greg and I. Esther and Dean stayed in Bavaria. We made our way, eventually, to the shuttle bus and to the car hire place.  With very little instruction we were on our way - they assume everyone can drive on the right hand side of the road!  Greg bravely took the wheel in our car, and I was navigating.  We made it to the Blue Lagoon for our first Iceland experience!  When we checked in, the girls had to go to a separate change room to shower and put on our bathers.  They recommend you don't get your hair wet so we all attempted to put our hair up out of the way.  I'd taken a shower cap from our Munich hotel especially for this but couldn't find it when scrabbling through the suitcase in the car (did I mention it was raining and windy?) but saw many others who had also thought this was a good idea!  Our "comfort package" - ...