Pre-Ankara-wedding disaster time

Or why being anywhere near Copenhagen gives me anxiety.

Look. I’ve been solo traveling since I was 18, figuring out airports and logistics etc. etc. by myself. My inner Solo Traveler is old enough to have her own driving permit, so you’d think I would be pretty good at this sort of thing by now. Or at least you’d think that when I do make a mistake, it’s a small and isolated one that’s easily rectified.

Like how I suddenly remembered at 4 p.m. on Thursday that my 2:50 a.m. Friday flight to Ankara would be leaving in 11 hours and not 35. Whew, crisis averted! I settled into my Copenhagen hostel pod for a nice pre-departure nap and then ended up dicking around on my phone the whole time. No worries, I could just sleep on the plane.

I’d traveled between Copenhagen Central Station and the airport three times just within the past week, so I considered myself an expert on the process. All the trains were a bit delayed when I arrived at Central Station, but I found the right platform and its information board listed the right train and the train departed at precisely the right time. By the time I realized I was in fact somehow on the wrong train, going in the wrong direction, and that it was an express route that wouldn’t stop again for 30 minutes, I was deep in the Danish countryside. I exited at the first possibility in Køge and U-turned, boarding the only train going back towards Copenhagen that would depart before midnight. The conductor mercifully let it slide, even though I definitely did not have the correct ticket for such shenanigans and have been financially burned under similar circumstances in both Germany and Romania.

I still made it to the airport with three hours to spare. Crisis averted again! Although, it was concerning that I’d already had two near-misses in such a short time span. Time to pull myself together long enough to check my gigantic bag full of slightly damp camping gear plus one party dress (but zero party shoes). Now, most airports do this logical thing where they tell you the number of the check-in desk you need to use, but nothing was listed yet in the airline app or on the departures board or the airport website. I was flying with a small budget airline I’d never even heard of before, so maybe they just wouldn’t open check-in until right before departure. Anyways, mine was the only flight departing within the next five hours, so surely I wouldn’t miss a single thing that happened in this airport. You see where I’m going with these rationalizations yet?

I settled down to wait…

and wait.

and wait…

Forty-five minutes before the planned departure, I’d had no announcements or updates from any of my channels and I was both concerned and pissed. The terminal was packed with people, but they were mostly passengers passed out sleeping on whatever flat surface they could find. Zero employees existed besides one listless janitor and a few metro police officers trying to keep the peace among some junkies sheltering overnight in the airport. I had no idea how many terminals there were and I didn’t want to wander aimlessly through this apocalyptic scene, so I just walked a few minutes down to (what I thought was) Terminal 2. Nothing.

In desperation I finally deigned to ask a police officer, who was just as clueless as expected, but then he said he might have seen a check-in happening over in the actual Terminal 2. By the time I made it down there, it was a ghost town – the desk, if it had indeed ever been opened, was closed.

In all my 16 years of solo traveling, that was the first plane I’d ever missed due to my own error. 

In a split second, I crumbled from a tired but rational woman into one of those who quietly screams obscenities to herself in the middle of an airport at 2:30 a.m. 

For half a minute, I entertained the idea of trashing the whole plan and just taking a train back to Marburg, but I fiercely wanted to go to Ankara to see my friends and had moved my entire preceding trip to the Faroes just to accommodate this wedding. Time to swallow my embarrassment, open my wallet, and perform some last-minute travel wizardry. A new flight from Copenhagen was out of the question thanks to insane Scandinavian prices, but a direct train to Hamburg followed by a direct flight to Ankara would do the trick and only delay my arrival by about 12 hours. I booked it and slid down a wall to finally sleep until I had to go back to Central Station (ugh), but I was promptly awoken by a gang of roaming police officers whose apparent goal in life is to ruin everything. 

Clearly it was past time to leave that hellish place and never return.

Against all expectation, the metro to the train to the subway to the Hamburg airport went flawlessly, although by the time I made it on board the (delayed) plane, I was so tired I could barely see straight. We also won’t mention the fact that I waited in the wrong check-in line at the Hamburg airport for 30 minutes. That was definitely some other sleep-hungry idiot.