The end.

And so, our great Danish adventure comes to an end. After a last rushed day of trading bikes (we decided not to bring them with us, due to freight time and costs, additional tax costs etc etc), last minute packing and cleaning, we made our way to the hotel at the airport to spend our last night, in preparation for our early morning flight on Sunday.

The restaurant in the hotel had Julefrokost (hooray! we all know how much I love that!) AND æbelskiver, so I got to indulge in my favourite Danish foods one last time. After a restless night due to nervousness (30 hours traveling with small children?! WHAT were we thinking?!) and excitement (we are going HOME!!!), we made our way to the terminal and onto the plane. Where we waited nearly two hours for the plane to be de-iced due to the unexpected snowfall.

This created a new stress for us … would we make our connection in London? We had to change terminals, we didn’t have a pushchair, we’d have to carry children and cabin baggage *stress stress stress*. The cabin crew were very encouraging that we had plenty of time (95 minutes) and as it happened we made our plane quite comfortably (and had the BEST shortest security queue EVER at terminal 3 at Heathrow). And so we board our second plane - the Airbus A380 - and sat for another two hours … waiting to be de-iced (remember the unseasonable snow?).

Finally we were in the air toward Singapore for yet another short stop - but this time we were staying on the same plane so we didn’t feel the stress of time pressure. What we felt was the pressure of a child with travel sickness. Believe me, it is ALWAYS worth taking a spare outfit (or seven) because you never know when it will hit. Singapore Changi Airport was a brief stopover consisting of me sitting listlessly and nauseous, trying to make sure the children didn’t wander away or vomit on anything important, while Simon dashed off looking for spare tshirts for Hugo. Let me say now, that leg of the flight is something I NEVER want to repeat again. In fact if I had my time over, I wouldn’t do a long haul flight that had more than one stopover. It’s just too stressful.

By the time we landed in Sydney we were all feeling better and excited to be home (except maybe Sophie, who had no concept of “home” that wasn’t Copenhagen). Our tentative euphoria melted as it became clear that our luggage had not made one of the connections at some point. It was just something we didn’t need at the end of 30 hours travel but in the end there was nothing for it but to go home and hope we had enough essentials to get us through until our luggage caught us up.

Fortunately, we managed to get together some underwear, summer clothes and toiletries, and to be fair Qantas got our luggage to us VERY quickly (3 bags within 24 hours and the other two the next day).

And strangely, it feels like barely a week has passed since we left home. In retrospect it went so quickly! I know there were times when it felt long, and slow, and incredibly hard but on the other hand we had so many great experiences and had so much fun!

We’ll remember our time in Copenhagen happily, and look at our photos and reminisce. Was it worth it? YES!! Would we do it again? … um, maybe. Ask me when the memory of that last flight has faded!!

Farvel, Denmark.

The end.