Spring Break: Cancelled Flights and 10 Days of Travel Plans

Written by khettlinger March 27, 2018

CIMBA students are so lucky to be given numerous opportunities to travel throughout Europe. One amazing part of the CIMBA program that everyone looks forward to is the travel week. We have an entire week off of school, which means an entire ten days to plan trips on our own. Some students had their parents come during this time, but for me and four of my friends, we were on our own in Europe!

The beginning of our travel week had quite the road bump. A snow storm hit a good portion of Europe and our first flight to London was cancelled. I have never had a flight cancelled before and when we found out only 2 hours before we were supposed to be getting into a taxi, it was a very stressful situation. What do you do when your flight gets cancelled? Well, we had to tell our taxi to not pick us up that night, change our flight so we could get to London as soon as possible, fill out a form to get a refund on our previous flight, ask our taxi if they could pick us up the next day, and tell our Airbnb host that we would not be staying there the first night. All in all, this was a huge learning experience for everyone I was traveling with. Between figuring out how to handle the situation and handle the stress, it’s a way of life and we grew a lot because of it. I thought when I left Chicago I dodged all the snow but I was wrong!

Now, planning for the entire spring break took quite a lot of work! Even planning some weekends takes a lot of time and we put off planning for this week until pretty much the last minute. This was stressful because for a previous weekend, three other friends and I were trying to buy plane tickets. After one person bought it, the price skyrocketed and it was a stressful situation to figure out what to do next. If possible, planning far in advance is the way to go. It is not easy to plan trips, especially while trying to be cautious of what you are spending. It is important to remember that you can not just book a flight and be finished with transportation, because that is not all there is to it! Taking into consideration the location of Paderno del Grappa, I had to take a taxi and then a train to just get to Venice. This adds on almost two hours of transportation time! All the money that is expected to be spent during a weekend goes very fast. While in a different city for a weekend, its so important to remember you’ll be buying souvenirs, eating out for your meals, purchasing tickets to do activities, and you might need to pay for transportation depending on how big the city is and where you need to get for your transportation methods!

The travel week was one of my favorite parts of studying abroad so far! I got to go to four different countries and experience tons of new food and cultures. It was ten days that will stick with me forever.