Day One - May 29, 2017

When we left Western Europe in 2012, we told ourselves that we really needed to go back and check out the less crowded, less expensive and less fast paced Eastern side of Europe. After getting sidetracked for a few years, we finally booked the tickets for a shorter "western" Eastern Europe trip last fall. The itinerary takes us through Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro (and Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic en route). We've been referring to this as our Eastern European adventure for a while, and then came across a post somewhere that told us these countries don't necessarily like to be called "Eastern European". Something about negative connotations. We're not sure what to do with that, but we know a few cities in America have directional pride. We are going to go with that for now and refer to this as our "Eastside Europe" trip. We know it's not impressive problem solving, but it'll do for now. We don't like to offend.

We got on the road today with a little help from Brian's folks. In exchange for a meal, they ferried us to the airport for our 3:20 flight with IcelandAir. It feels a little odd to be traveling with Iceland Air and not staying in Iceland, but we like them better than their competition and the stop in Iceland only adds one hour to a ten hour flight. For whatever reason, the plane felt a little sauna like and the 7 hour flight to Keflavík Airport was muggy and unpleasant. We landed, spent an hour finding our next flight, and (just past midnight Anchorage time) boarded our second plane to Munich.