Upcoming Cruise In September

Since Veronica and I have only 170 days until our 14 day NCL begins, we have been testing the waters so to speak, as far as the cost of flying to Copenhagen Denmark, which is when the cruise embarks and disembarks.
I have been checking off and on now for about 2 months and the prices have been outragious to say the least.
Yesterday I checked airlines for flight offerings and the cost of those flights. The cost of an Economy fare ran anywhere from $2,300.00 plus to almost $5,000.00
With the way the fuel prices have slowly moved up in cost, I figured that the prices that I was seeing would only get worse as time went by.
I even checked prices at CheapoAir. Both Veronica and I swore to never get another plane ticket via CheapoAir.
Although you can get the tickets cheaper a lot of times by going through them, if there is any problem with your flight, the airlines won't help you out at all because you bought the tickets via a 3rd party...CheapoAir.
We had this happen to us the very first time we bought tickets via CheapoAir.
We attempt to get the airline to help us but was told that because we got the ticket via 3rd party, we would have to go through that 3rd party for assistance.
We received no help whatsoever from CheapoAir. Thus we both swore that we would never buy tickets through them ever again.
After spending a couple hours getting frustrated by not being able to find good flight times and the high cost of purchasing the airline tickets, I made a telephone call to someone that is associated with the travel/cruise business.
I was told that buying the plane tickets through the cruise line would be very expensive and that I should try a web site such as Kayak.
We decided to give Kayak a try and was pleasantly surprised and relieved that we were able to find airline flights that met our needs and the prices were reasonable compared to all of the other prices that we encountered.
We ended up getting our tickets through Kayak, which actually linked us up to the United Airlines actual web site. By doing it this way, we were buying the tickets directly from United and not via a 3rd party.
We fly from Norfolk to Dulles and after a 5 1/2 layover in Dulles, we will fly non stop into Copenhagen. Many of the other flight iteraries had us going from Dulles or another stateside airport to either an airport in France, Germany or The Netherlands.
We will be landing in Copenhagen around 7:15AM their local time.
We will arrange for either shuttle service or get a taxi to take us to Copenhagen Marriott hotel. We will have the hotel store our luggage in a safe place until later on that night, when we return to the hotel from our day of sightseeing in Copenhagen.
After having our breakfast at the hotel the next morning, we will then be shuttled to the pier where we will embark on our 14 day cruise.
After the cruise, we will either take NCLs shuttle service or a taxi back to the airport. Our flight to start our homeward journey leaves at 12:20PM.
We arrive back into Dulles around 3PM local time.
After a 2 hour layover in Dulles, we will be on our way back to Norfolk ansd should arrive there around 6PM. Most of the other flights that we had checked on had us landing back in Norfolk around 10:30PM or 11:30PM.
Getting into Norfolk around 6PM will be so much nicer than arriving later on that night.
We have already booked one excursion for Iceland and the only other excursion that we need to decide on will be for Scotland. We will choose between going into Glasgow or going into Edinburgh.
Because the ship docks in Greenock, passengers have to take a shuttle to either city that they choose to visit between those 2.
We are leaning towards going into Edinburgh but we won't make our final decision until it gets a little closer to our cruise date.