If I hear another person say that they are going to “wing it” when traveling for two weeks in Europe on Spring Break, I might scream. The idea that European travel is a trip to the amusement park where you are rushed to and from historical landmarks and pub crawls without any planning or effort is completely preposterous.

I planned my travel break back in January. I have made an itinerary of not only my flight and train travel information and hostel accommodations, but also of important sites to see and tours to take. True, many may call my travel planning obsessive, over zealous, and even neurotic (which I should admit, at some level, it is); but it is also safe and reassuring.

With an itinerary as iron-clad as mine, the unexpected is expected and the dangerous, avoided.  Or so I thought, and then I arrived in Greece for five days of blissful sunshine and black sand beaches on Santorini (a much needed escape from the land of ice and snow, Copenhagen).

Now, most of you will know that Greece is bankrupt (much to the chagrin of Germany and the rest of the EU) which meant nothing to me until the transportation employees became fed up with pay cuts and decided to strike regularly.

These strikes are largely unimportant in the grand scheme of things, unless you happen to be flying into Athens after a week in Istanbul in complete isolation from news sources.

After flying in just under the radar, (literally an hour before a strike began), I found myself grounded in Athens for the duration of the strike (less than eight hours) and considered myself lucky to arrive, until the strike ended and, a day and a half later, I was still not on my flight to Santorini.

Unfortunately in all of my online research before booking, no one mentioned that flying to a Greek island in March is a terrible idea to say the least.

There is a reason for those cheap off-season hotel prices and abandoned beaches: with the winds across the Aegean, it is almost impossible to fly to the island and the six hour daily ferry across the choppy sea is none too appealing.

To make a long story short, three canceled flights and a complementary night in a beautiful, but abandoned resort later, I never made it to Santorini.

This will probably bother me until I finally get to see the great Caldera from an open-air Taverna on the cliffs.

Instead, as the rest of my traveling companions (residents of the Worrell House) tried their luck with a flight to slightly less windy Paros, my boyfriend and I managed to spend twice as long in what was once the center of the universe– Athens.

After receiving 60 euro in compensation from Olympic Air for our troubles, we grabbed the bus into town and began exploring the ancient city.

The sun shone, the birds sang and the museums and monuments of Athens were free all weekend long in an entirely unexpected and thoroughly delightful turn of events.

Our five days in Greece passed more quickly than I’d have liked as we toured the Acropolis, Temple of Olympian Zeus and the closest island to Athens, Aegina.

All in all, the trip was nothing that I had planned, but flying out of Athens to Denmark (once again narrowly avoiding a strike), I was certain that it had completely independent of my intentions; it was changed only for the better.

I’m still not willing to “wing it” completely when my actual travel break comes around, but come hell or high water, I know I’ll still have a good time, maybe even a better time than the one I’d planned.