Author Topic: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen  (Read 14283 times)

Offline shmebeble

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Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« on: August 19, 2016, 12:34:26 PM »
tbc

Offline Yehoshua

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2016, 01:47:54 PM »
That's not fair! Too much of a teaser.

Offline @Yehuda

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #2 on: August 19, 2016, 04:32:54 PM »
67% of TRs that start this way never get finished. :P

Offline Yaalili

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2016, 05:13:38 PM »
Nice, can't wait.

Offline shmebeble

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2016, 05:38:58 PM »

Something
« Last Edit: August 19, 2016, 05:43:19 PM by shmebeble »

Offline Yaalili

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2016, 05:41:18 PM »
Great picture!

Offline shmebeble

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #6 on: August 21, 2016, 08:03:18 PM »
Here we go......
The Booking
In early May my wife and I realized we would have exactly 2 weeks to escape after our summer commitments and before school began. We decided on Israel and somewhere in Europe. We wanted to maximize our time so I looked for a flight out on motzei Shabbos. I discovered that in August there are maybe 6 flights from the nyc airports that leave after 10:40pm. Since shabbos ended at 9:06pm the week we wanted to leave we didn't want to leave before then. I found availability on a delta flight to Manchester departing at 10:41pm. First step  :D. There was a connecting flight with availability to Paris so I added that to the plan. We would spend 4 days in Paris before heading to Israel.
I was a bit worried if we would make the flight with 1hr 35min to get to the airport, check-in and get through security. I figured with so few flights departing at that time, what could go wrong? Hint: Of course something went wrong that night!
Before booking the flights I checked the PH Paris and there was availability. I bought 4 Hyatt nights, booked those first as they are refundable and then booked out tickets on Delta.
I delayed buying the flight from Paris to Israel as they were expensive and I was hoping an award flight would open before we left. We were ready to head off to Paris!

62.5k DL each in J

Fast forward a month. In June a friend asked me to find him a nice island in Europe for him and his wife. After a simple google search, which obviously was waaayyyy too difficult for him to do, I found a website with 20 unique islands in Europe. I scrolled through the first few and was not impressed. Then popped up the picture of the Faores. It was out of this world. With the endless grassy cliffs, multitude of birds, dozens hikes and lack of tourists  this place just became number one on my bucket list (luckily I have been fortunate enough to shorten this list a lot recently).
First step was convincing the wife. This was the difficult task. I googled pictures of the Faroe islands, copied a few links, and included them in an email titled "am I crazy?". I quickly sent that email and started researching flights. Before I had time to make my first search I got a response "Cancel Paris. We are going there!".
I quickly realized the islands have one airline called Atlantic airways. They own 7 planes (and two helicopters) and mostly operate to and from Denmark. I searched for flights from Manchester and Paris to the Faroe Islands and the best price was from Manchester 11 hours after we landed from JFK, with an ON connection in Copenhagen and an early flight the next morning to the islands.
Updated itinerary- JFK-MAN DL  J with 11 hours to explore. Sunday nigth MAN-CPH in Y with overnight. Monday 7am flight to Faroes on Atlantic airways Y is the only way to get there- sorry snobs!

Getting to Israel would be fun. We needed to get there by Friday morning. Atlantic airways has very few partners and 2 levels of tickets- cheap and expensive. We were able to get some of the cheap bucket for the flight to the islands but no cheap, returning flights were left for that week. So we had to settle on leaving the Faroes Wednesday night, landing in CPH at 11:30pm. This gave us 3 complete days on the islands and 2 nights. We were initially afraid this was not enough time, but in hindsight it was the perfect amount for us.
To maximize our time in CPH we found a 7pm flight (Thurs.) to Zurich on SAS J (Euro business) and then in lie-flat from ZRH to TLV at 11pm arriving around 4am Friday morning. The flight from Faroes was cash and we paid 25k SQ for the CPH-ZRH-TLV in J.
To get back from Israel we had a very tight window and the only availability was on Elal for nearly  100k amex each in J. I swallowed that.
But since I am not going into the Israel details much, I will happily say I found United Biz direct to EWR 20 hours before takeoff and was able to use 57.5k SQ and "redistribute" my Elal (hameivin yavin)

Overall our flights looked like this:

62.5k DL  J JFK-MAN
Cash for Atlantic airways Y
25k SQ  SAS+LX J
57.5k SQ UA J

« Last Edit: August 21, 2016, 08:14:17 PM by shmebeble »

Offline Yehoshua

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #7 on: August 21, 2016, 08:21:28 PM »
Wow, that sounds like a nice schedule. What did you do for hotels? And I assume you took just carry ons?

Offline Yaalili

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #8 on: August 21, 2016, 08:22:19 PM »
What was pricing like for Atlantic Air?

Offline Something Fishy

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #9 on: August 21, 2016, 09:39:10 PM »
Looking forward to the rest...

Just so you know, there are cheap flights on Air Iceland from REK to the Faroes as well.
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Offline shmebeble

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #10 on: August 22, 2016, 09:18:50 AM »
Looking forward to the rest...

Just so you know, there are cheap flights on Air Iceland from REK to the Faroes as well.
You are correct. However, I needed to leave from Manchester or Paris and had to get to Israel.

What was pricing like for Atlantic Air?
Was $126 for flight from Copenhagen and $256 from the Faroes. I added on Man-CPH and was cheapest to buy through SAS for the MAN-CPH-FAE. $212 I think

Offline tzvicoco

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #11 on: August 22, 2016, 10:02:05 AM »
I just hope you have more resilience than the 67%

Offline shmebeble

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #12 on: August 22, 2016, 10:11:12 AM »
I just hope you have more resilience than the 67%
Am I winning?

Offline mgoldhammer18

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #13 on: August 29, 2016, 01:44:16 PM »
@shmebeble, don't you still need to finish your kosherica tr?

Offline Yaalili

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #14 on: August 29, 2016, 08:02:29 PM »
@shmebeble, don't you still need to finish your kosherica tr?

Yeh good reminder :)

Offline Elite

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #15 on: September 13, 2016, 09:50:46 PM »
Am interested to know what you did in Manchester. Can't think of anything interesting or touristic there to do

Offline shmebeble

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #16 on: June 08, 2017, 02:51:36 PM »
Well now that finals are over.........
We stayed in Woodmere for shabbos because our flight was only an hour and a half after shabbos ended. My great plan was for a friend in Israel to check us in over shabbos, and then we should be safe to get to the airport and through security to make the flight. On motzash I turned on my phone to find a long voicemail from my friend explaining that AF had cancelled the second leg of our trip (from MAN-PARIS) and rebooked us on a flight that left the day before our flight to MAN. Yes, they booked us leaving from MAN-CDG before our JFK-MAN flight. Naturally we were worried and as we sped to the airport I called Delta. Of course they had a 2 hour wait  ::)
I literally ran into the airport like a crazy man, and went right to the Priority check-in. BH the agent was super helpful and after 5 minutes of typing away and a few "hmmms" she had us reconfirmed on our original flight to CPH and had us leaving to Paris two days later- (I wonder if I can still get compensation for having to "miss" that flight?). We made it though security quickly after some nice pax lets us skip. To quote: "we could see the panic on your faces." Conveniently, our pilots went missing for an hour and a half so we had time to shower and relax in the lounge before take-off. Immediately after taxiing to the runway, the electricity on our plane shut off unexpectedly and it took the crew a few minutes to fix this (is this common?). Apparently they didn't think it was a big deal because we took off 10 min later.


{We landed in Manchester- paid to store our luggage and took the train from the airport to the city. There was a free bus from the train that gave us a mini tour and ultimately took us to John Rylands library. It was very nice inside, we found some Judaica pictures and books- which is always a pleaser; overall it was a great time filler. Since it was a beautiful day we walked around a shopping area near St. Annes square and had encounters with the most polite homeless people. From there we ubered to a pizza place where we ordered some tasty brick over pizza. Unfortunately it doesn't hold a candle to Pizza da Solo, but we were hungry so it was delicious. We grabbed food from Ta'am for later and when we realized Uber had a 5x surge, we asked a yiddishe speaking women in the "cute gifts" store across the street to call a car service. The flight to CPH was uneventful and we checked into the airport Hilton at 11:30pm for a quick night. The next morning we made sure to get up (way too) early as we thought the airport might be busy, but the CPH airport is so efficient and quick that we were through the economy security in under 10 minutes.}
An hour later we were aboard our Atlantic Airways flight. As we sat down the exhaustion of only sleeping a combined 7 hours the past two nights finally hit us, and we contemplated going straight to our Airbnb host when we landed. Don't worry, the exhaustion did not last long once we saw what lay ahead.

The Faroe Islands:
« Last Edit: June 08, 2017, 03:02:10 PM by shmebeble »

Offline Yehoshua

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #17 on: June 08, 2017, 02:56:34 PM »
Great job. Looking forward to the rest!

Offline Silverswift92

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Offline Something Fishy

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Re: Faroe Islands- with a day in Manchester and Copenhagen
« Reply #19 on: October 08, 2017, 05:43:46 PM »
67% of TRs that start this way never get finished. :P

@shmebeble let's not let @yehuda have the last laugh here ;)...
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