Travel Experiences to Europe

Before this trip, I had never traveled alone.  I actually had never even traveled out of the country.  For those two reasons I was pretty nervous for the trip to Europe.  I got flights by myself because I didn't really know anyone in the class at first to book flights with.  I ended up with flights from Minneapolis to Chicago, Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany, and Frankfurt to Berlin, Germany.  Each of my layovers on the way over were only an hour long.  

First off, I would recommend to future participants to get flights with another student.  Traveling alone can be stressful, especially if you never have been before or if you run into problems (which were both the case for me).  I learned a lot traveling alone for the first time, but I still think I would have rather had someone with me going through the same thing.  Also, I would recommend to future participants to get layovers that are longer than an hour, especially if they have more than one of them.  When I arrived in Chicago it was thunder storming and so we weren't able to get off the plane from Minneapolis for over an hour after we had landed.  Luckily my connecting flight to Frankfurt, Germany was also delayed due to the thunderstorms and so I made it to that plane just in time, although it took me running through the entire airport to do so.  

Once my plane to Frankfurt was loaded we sat on the runway for over an hour because there was so many planes backed up waiting for the thunderstorms to end so they could take off.  Once we were up in the air everything went pretty smoothly.  The only thing that caused me any stress during the flight was the fact that I gave my aisle seat up to a woman who complained about having back problems that caused her to need to get up and walk around often.  The only times she got up throughout the entire flight was when I woke her up to let me out to get to the bathroom.  I was annoyed to say the least.  The food was surprisingly decent on the flight, and sadly I think that was mostly because it was a European airline and not an American one.  I was also surprised that they served wine for free during the flight (a huge plus).  

Due to the late start from Chicago, I completely missed my connecting flight from Frankfurt to Berlin.  I had never been outside the United States and spoke absolutely no German, so finding the people I needed to talk to in order to get on a different flight and make sure my checked bag ended up in the same place as me at the same time proved to be difficult and nerve racking.  I thought I would be saving myself time and stress by having connecting flights with such short layovers, but after the experience I had I would never schedule my flights that close together ever again.