A Tale of Two Hotels - July 8, 2009

We woke up to our last day in the Scandinavian countries refreshed and ready to go (in spite of the very small hotel room – and small beds to match!) Little did we realize that the contrast with our accommodations later that day would be a study in contrasts. After breakfast we lugged our bulging suitcases (now I know where the term luggage comes from) to the train station. Thankfully we had wheels on the largest suitcases and thus we made our way down the sidewalks of Copenhagen looking very much like tourists.

After waiting for a little bit we were able to board the train that would take us to Hannover, Germany. By this time we were experts at getting all our luggage and ourselves onto the train and settled into place. The train trip had nothing of note – or perhaps we were simply worn out and didn’t pay attention to things that would have caught our fancy earlier in the trip. Actually there was one cool thing about the trip - at one point the train boarded a ferry to cross a body of water. We had to leave the train while the ferry sailed, and doing so we were able to see the train tracks built into the floor of the ferry. Thinking back on this now I realize that within a 24 hour span we travelled by rail, sea and air!

Once in Hannover we walked the couple of blocks from the train station to the hotel where we discovered that we had been upgraded because the room we had booked was not available. This was one of the hotel rooms booked using our Airmiles. So up we went to the top floor of the hotel and walked into the most luxurious and spacious suite we had been in the whole trip (see the picture above). The irony was we weren’t able to enjoy it very long because we had such an early start the next morning.

The best thing about this room was all the space! We were able to unpack everything, and then re-pack it as efficiently as possible for the trip home. So rather than being able to enjoy the spacious room and huge bed with a lazy day and sleeping in the next morning (in the lovely huge bed) we simply grabbed some food from a grocery store in the train station and proceeded to eat, and repack. When that was done we fell into bed exhausted… it was time to head home!