WASHINGTON – The Georgetown University women's soccer team concluded its action-packed 10-day European spring break trip with an exciting ending – an unexpected extra night in Germany. Senior Alyssa Cronin (Green Township, N.J. / Newton) reflects on the final days of the trip in which a 10-day excursion happened in 11 days in the final blog post of the journey.

Day 9 - Saturday, March 9

For the first time on our trip, there was nothing on our itinerary until noon. Naturally, we still set our alarms for 8 a.m., determined to eat our way through the hotel breakfast buffet (complete with an omelet and crepe station) and make the most of our brief stay in Düsseldorf, Germany. We walked into the town center, scoping out as many bakeries, chocolatiers and clothing stores as we could in three hours. We spent most of our time at the Carlsplatz Market which had over 60 local vendors offering everything from fresh produce and pastries to specialty soaps and wood carvings.
 
After spending nearly all of our Euros on German chocolates, we hopped on our bus to Signal Iduna Park to watch our second professional match of the trip: Borussia Dortmund vs. VfB Stuttgart. The atmosphere was indescribable. If Americans could experience a virtual reality simulation of a Dortmund home game, I think our whole country could finally be convinced that soccer is an exciting sport to watch. The stadium holds 81,365 and there was not an empty seat in the house. According to the club's website, there are over 50,000 people on the waitlist for season tickets. After we raided the souvenir shop, we blended right into the sea of Dortmund Yellow. Virtually everyone in the sellout crowd had two yellow scarves: one to wear around their necks and one for celebratory purposes: raising them proudly during the fight song and swinging them around like maniacs after Dortmund goals. It wasn't until after the game that Kelly Ann Livingstone realized that the giant German words stitched into her scarf actually translated to "Thanks Mom."

We received plenty of flak for being Americans, but our saving grace, 20-year-old Pennsylvania-born Christian Pulisic, subbed in with 10 minutes left and notched a goal, helping to restore our peoples' reputation. Dortmund pulled off a 3-1 victory despite a steady downpour the entire game.
 
We headed to our fifth country of the trip for dinner: Italy. Well, at least that's what our beloved Italian tour guide told us as we headed to an Italian restaurant in Germany with an all-Italian staff. We lost track of how many courses the meal was, but there was certainly no shortage of pizza: cheese, margherita, and my personal favorite, which honestly offended the Italians, cheeseless veggie. Filled with tomato sauce and Dortmund bandwagon pride, we set off for our final destination: Frankfurt, Germany.
 
Day 10 – Sunday, March 10
 
On travel days, the best case scenario is an uneventful journey. Boredom is ideal. That doesn't make for an interesting blog post though, so thankfully, our departure went far from smoothly. Our adventure began with yet another magical hotel breakfast, and I would have been content if my bowl of chia pudding was the highlight of this recap. Since Frankfurt is home to Europe's busiest (and seemingly least efficient) airport, we arrived with three hours to spare. We passed the ultimate test of keeping our checked bags under 23 kilograms, crawled our way through customs and security, spent the last of our Euros on plane snacks, and boarded our 11 a.m. flight with reasonable aspirations of watching Crazy Rich Asians and Bohemian Rhapsody, getting some homework done, and beginning to make up for a week of sleep deprivation.
 
Amanda Carolan and I opted for the Sky Magazine crossword puzzle. We nearly completed it before we even left the tarmac. As much as I'd love to attribute this to our high-functioning brains and extensive trivial knowledge, we only got this far because we had been sitting on the tarmac for almost three hours. We ditched the puzzle when the pilot came on the intercom with the first of what would be several announcements.
 
At 12:11 p.m., he gave us the concerningly-vague update that there was an issue with the plane that would take "no less than one hour" to resolve. Next, we were informed that this mysterious issue could not be resolved by simply replacing an external part; they would instead have to "go into the system a little bit" into the "fuselage" of the aircraft. When I googled "fuselage," NASA.gov reassured me that "the fuselage or body of the airplane holds all of the pieces together." Nothing too important, just all of the pieces. At 12:52, we knew we were in rough shape when the pilot told us they didn't have an updated ETA but they did order more snacks and beverages for us. You don't get free snacks when things are going well, everyone knows that.

At 1:25, as if the physical status of our plane wasn't distressing enough, the pilot told us that severe weather had suddenly moved into the area as well, so the mechanics couldn't even continue working until it passed. This added another hour to our ETA, and, for additional dramatic effect the pilot threw in some legal details.
 
"I'm not allowed to keep you captive on a plane more than four hours, and because we're not at the terminal and I don't have access to a gate, we're going to start having the busses come out and be in position to take you back to the terminal before we hit that four-hour point. If it comes down to that and the plane's still not fixed, that's pretty much going to do it for us today."
 
The look of utter shock and disgust on Amanda Carolan's face when she heard this news could be a viral meme. Sure enough, there is a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulation that prevents airlines from holding passengers in a tarmac delay for more than four hours, and the clock was ticking faster than Kelly Ann Livingstone can eat a crêpe. At 2:20, we finally felt a glimmer of hope. Our pilot was mistaken (which is always reassuring) and our four-hour countdown didn't start until the door of the plane officially closed, so that bought us some extra time. The pilot assured us that only a few passengers requested to deplane and they already had their luggage, so that wouldn't delay us too much. He then projected a 3:05 takeoff, and everyone started applauding this news until he added that the absolute latest we could legally take off was 3:09, leaving us a comfortable four-minute buffer. Despite making our departure seem totally possible 15 minutes earlier, the pilot sealed our destiny at 2:35.
 
"There's no way we could possibly do all of this within our four-hour limit so Delta has gone ahead and cancelled our flight. Looks like today just isn't our day, folks."
 
I couldn't help but think it could have been our day if they had just made sure our plane was mechanically sound before all 300 passengers buckled their seatbelts, but all I know about airplanes is that B.O.B song, so I suppressed that thought and embraced our fate.
 
Considering we had just spent four hours trapped on a plane that was incapable of flying, our team morale was pretty high. We quickly found the silver lining: great Snapchat content. Everyone loves a well-documented travel fiasco (I unfortunately know this from experience), so we were sure to capture every complication with dramatic captions about being stuck in Germany forever.
 
It was all fun and games until we all realized that while we were laughing our way through the customs line and earning our second Germany stamps of the day, our coaching staff had become responsible for 25 students "stranded" in a foreign country which, according to school policy, is classified as some level of emergency. Thankfully, Lyndse, Kristen, Alex, and Maggie were professional crisis managers in their past lives and they not only welcomed but contributed to our comic relief. I should mention that Coach Dave missed out on all of the fun after he ditched us for Dublin earlier that day and made it out of Frankfurt unscathed.
 
As we waited to reunite with our baggage, we began drafting emails to our professors to let them know we wouldn't quite be in class (or in the country) on Monday. After we retraced our entire morning in the airport to re-enter Germany, we ran for the hotel shuttles, embracing survival-of-the-fittest approach as we thrust our luggage and ourselves onto the bus before the other 270 angry Delta passengers beat us to it.
 
By 5 p.m., we checked into what we hoped and prayed would be our last hotel before inhaling the complimentary dinner that Delta hoped would make up for this unexpected extension to our trip. The food was good, but it was merely an appetizer compared to the four-course meals we had been scarfing down all week. Fully aware of our insatiable appetites, the coaches brought us straight from dinner #1 to dinner #2 at a restaurant across the street called Champions. The menu was in English and there were two different soccer games playing on giant projector screens while we ate, so we fit right in.
 
When we found out that we would be leaving the hotel by 5 a.m. to catch our flight, going to sleep sounded like the best way to spend the rest of our bonus night in Germany.
 
Day 11 – Monday, March 11
 
There's no better way to kick off your 19th birthday than with a 4 a.m. wakeup call. Jenna Royson's big day was packed with all of her favorite activities: lugging suitcases, waiting in long lines with hundreds of impatient strangers, eating airline food and being airborne for 10 consecutive hours. The festivities officially began at 4:40 a.m. when we met in our hotel lobby and battled our way onto the airport shuttles. We received our third Germany stamp in our passports and fueled up at a cafe before braving the security line. The guard interrogated us as to why we were smiling. I guess our team just knows how to get a good laugh out of anything; even a three-hour pre-sunrise ordeal in a foreign airport.
 
When the pilot mentioned something about "over-fueling" issues, we were ready to start drafting emails to our Tuesday professors. Luckily, the problem was resolved and we bid farewell to Germany at last. Ten hours and four and a half movies later, I was ready to cartwheel onto American soil. As we began our descent to Atlanta, the whole plane began applauding our flight crew as if that didn't completely jinx our chances of ever deplaning. Thankfully, they got away with it and we successfully landed around 2 p.m. EST.

After an eight-hour layover in Atlanta, we finally made it to the last leg of our journey. As we boarded our flight home and the lights on the plane briefly shut off, we wondered if we'd ever make it back. Against all odds, we landed in D.C. just before midnight, and according to Caitlin Farrell's hourly documentation of our travel day(s), we made it home a full 48 hours after we initially set out to leave Germany that fateful Sunday morning.
 
Travel woes included, it was an unforgettable trip from start to finish. Eleven days, four countries, seven cities, five hotels, four games, nine goals, zero losses, five trips through customs, 14 girls stuck in a Paris hotel elevator, countless crepes, waffles, baguettes, bus naps, team snaps, Ghent puns, and narrowly-avoided cave-biking accidents, 25 sunflowers, and one Giancarlo. We conquered all of Europe, and we can't wait to do it a-Ghent in five years on our reunion tour.