For my very first flight alone, and my first international flight (as far as I remember), things went amazingly smoothly. The plane me and Sam were on was not uncomfortable, aside from the usual, unavoidable trappings of airplanes. I even managed to get an hour or two of sleep, and the plane had USB ports under the armrests, allowing me to charge my phone for the trip. Little did I know I would sorely need every single percentage point upon getting off the plane.
I expected the plane ride to be the difficult part, if anything. I figured the train ride would go smoothly, save for maybe a little confusion as to where my train would be. There was plenty of that, but the train, when I found it, was three hours late. Thankfully, I had a flexible ticket, meaning I could take any other train on the same route with that ticket. All of those, however, were also incredibly late, and those that weren’t came in on the wrong side. The only way to get from one side to the other was to go up a floor and walk over up there, and the trains that showed up on the wrong side didn’t wait for passengers as long as the others. Fun times. When I finally got on a train, late for my connecting ride for which I originally had two hours of leeway, I got off at the wrong stop, because I wanted to stop at the main station of Frankfurt, Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof / Frankfurt Central Station, not Frankfurt am Main Stadion.
I finally managed to find a train with Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as a midway stop. When I got there, I had to buy a new ticket to Paderborn, which also ended up having a connecting trip. The first trip was very comfortable, but like every single other train I had seen that day, it was late, and so I missed the connecting train. Finally, I found a way to get to Paderborn from there with, wouldn’t you know it, a connection. This connection, however, I made, and after fumbling a bit with the bus system at about 1:00AM, I finally got to In Via.
I’m confident the rest of this trip will go far better, and save for a bout of post nasal drip I just recovered from today, it has, so far. But the trip hasn’t even techincally started yet, so we’ll see!