I am now less than 2 days out from the first leg of my journey to Europe. Third time’s the charm, right? I’ll be flying from LAX to Boston. From there, I’ll go BOS to KEF and on to CDG. I managed to get a $99 flight from Boston to Paris during the Wow Air sale a few months back. I paid for a checked bag though, so it ended up being around $175. European carry on size + cold weather clothing = difficult. After Paris, I’ll be taking the Channel Tunnel (or Chunnel as we Americans say) to explore jolly old England for a few days. Then back to reality. 

My flight into Iceland will be in the wee hours of the morning during fall. I’m hoping to *maybe* get a glimpse of the Northern Lights and I nabbed seats facing north both into KEF and out. I’m a window seat girl anyways, so no harm there.

I just discovered that Wow Air (BOS-KEF-CDG) has no onboard entertainment, so I’m gonna have to get creative. I guess I’ll finally be checking out those offline Amazon Prime offerings. I’ll also be packing some gluten free food for the trip. I’m thinking apples, some leftover cauliflower florets, crackers, bars, and some Gatorade powder to prevent dehydration. My other long haul flight essentials: Tylenol, eye mask, earplugs, headphones (two sets), reading material, music, my collapsible Vapur water bottle, and, occasionally, pre-downloaded movies and TV shows. I bring two sets of headphones because I once endured a solo 11 hour trans-Atlantic flight with zero headphones after the metal jack of my headphones got lodged in the armrest plug and broke off. Of course, this happened within 5 minutes of takeoff and the flight attendants had given out every last pair of the airline headsets. Yay. 

As for the rest of the trip, all planning and researching and note-taking and guidebook reading has been done. Phew. I have my packing list good to go and now just need to actually pack. Easier said than done. The weather forecast jumped up about 15* since I had last checked it so I’ll have to revise the packing list a tad. 

I’m pretty excited for the trip, but at this point I just want it to start. I may have over researched. I used to be a bit more carefree about this stuff, but the gluten limitations spur me into research mode, and I fall to click bait time and time again. Most of the time I’ll go online to google one trip-related thing and then look up from my iPad two hours later. It’s like I never really grew out of my StumbleUpon phase from college. Sidenote- only use StumbleUpon if you have enormous strength of will. It is too addicting for me.

Ttfn.