Billund

Time to set sightseeing aside and relate to you an adventure of a completely different nature. Transportation within Denmark was one of the few things we could not pre-book from Canada. We have to get ourselves from Billund to Odense, Odense to Coppenhagen and Coppenhagen to Oslo.

Rome to Rio is a website that we have found very helpful in our planning. You put in the names of two places and it tells you all the available routes, methods of transport, length of trip and cost. Links take you directed to the bus, train, or airline website you need. Very helpful. Monday evening we log on to book for Tuesday morning.

Got on to the Danish train website. We have to take a bus from here to another town, and switch to a train. Find our route, pick our times, no problem. Big problem. Before we can buy our tickets, the website crashes. Several times. I suspect it may be an issue with the translation to English.

We go down to the front desk, and when the lovely young lady who checked us in was free, asked if she could help us navigate the site in it's original Danish. She was very happy to help. I was right, once we didn't use the translation, it didn't crash any more. No problem. 

Problem - we aren't using phone service here, and the site wants to text or print the tickets. Our lovely assistant tells us to get it emailed to us, forward it to her and she will print them on the hotel printer, or download train app and get the tickets right on that. No problem!

Problem. Mastercard does not like us using our cards on oversees websites. We could not pay for our tickets. At this point we are getting discouraged. We had a long, busy day and we hadn't eaten yet. It's already after 8:00pm. So we aren't at our most brilliant. (Hard to believe, I know!!) We asked if we would be able to buy our tickets in person, in the morning. She said we could, but it lowered our chances of getting the times we wanted or a seat so we didn't have to stand.

Then this sweet, wonderful, angel of a girl offers, "I get off at 10, I could go buy the tickets for you and bring them back." I'm completely dumbfounded that she would do this for us. So I agree to meet her in the lobby at 10.

So we go back to our room and eat our supper of crackers, cheese and yogurt (apparently we were supposed to make reservations for the restarant). We bought our supper at the campground convenience store across the street - options were limited and it was raining. 

We knew were the bus terminal was, we walked past it our first night after supper, so I thought the ticket buying would be simple and quick. I meet our angel in the lobby at 10 and offer to go with, so I can get the instructions first hand. Janis is already tucking into bed. So off we go. After a couple minutes, I realize we are going in a different direction that I had expected. When I commented, she said, "We have to go to the train station to buy the tickets." She was taking me all the way to the second town where we switch from the bus to the train, 30 minutes away!

Keep in mind, Janis and I can't text here, and we thought this would be a 10 minute errand! I don't get back to the hotel until 11:15!