TODAY was awful. Pretty much everything that could go wrong did. First, our flight from New Orleans to JFK was delayed by four hours. This meant we would miss our connecting flight to London.

Delta was great and helped us re-route our trip through Detroit. However this meant rushing to the airport to get on an even earlier flight. But we made it and the Detroit airport had a P.F. Chang’s and a nice wine bar.

The Virgin Atlantic flight to London was pretty awesome – free drinks, a nice little travel kit with toothpaste, toothbrush, sleeping mask, earplugs, etc, and a TV for each person with a bunch of different movies and shows to choose from. We were in the very middle of the plane so didn’t get much sleep.

We had a 4-hour layover in Heathrow which was pretty uneventful other than Jillian having to throw away all her shampoo and conditioner because apparently England is very strict about the liquids rule. You’re only allowed to bring one small Ziploc per person.

We had a full English breakfast at The Gorgeous Kitchen, which is supposed to be the best airport restaurant in the world. It was delicious and revived us. Then we sat around for another 2 hours.

The flight to Warsaw was fine. We slept some. We had a very short connection for our flight to Krakow and had to go through security AGAIN. Of course they had to run all of our bags through twice. We ran to the gate to catch our Krakow flight, arriving totally out of breath to find out that it had been cancelled due to fog. LOT Polish Airlines said they would refund the flight (we have to call or do it online), and directed us to a kiosk to get a travel voucher so we could take a taxi to the train station, where we could catch a train to Krakow.

We ran outside with our voucher and showed it to the closest cabbie who said “yes, yes.” But when we got to the train station he said that he would not take the voucher. Knowing that we only had a few minutes to catch the express train to Krakow, Jillian just threw 50 zlotys at him and we grabbed our bags and ran inside….

We didn’t realize there was a 45-minute line to buy tickets. So we missed that express train. People were not super helpful. We had read online that most Poles speak English, but most only spoke a little and didn’t understand us very well. We booked tickets on the next express train (we think) and then stood around on the cold platform waiting for the train to come.

The train came and we got on board, but we didn’t really understand our ticket, so spent a few frantic minutes trying to find our car, and then our seats in the car. Jillian felt so helpless not being able to speak the language. We have a Polish-translator app but the pronunciation of words is so different, even when we pull up the correct word we want to say, we have trouble pronouncing it. Dziekuje – that’s “thank you.” Try pronouncing that bad boy!

We are on the train to Krakow now. We’ll be arriving about 4 hours later than we’d planned. We have no internet and 100 zlotys cash – hope we make it to our AirBnb!