I'm a much more experienced traveler then I used to be. Back in the old days, traveling to Europe felt a little bit like traveling to the moon: it seemed unbelievably foreign, and my sense of the continent made me believe that I had to take every single thing I could every imagine needing, because buying, say toothpaste, there would be SO difficult. This days are long gone. When I get into that kind of an overpacking mode, I remind myself, "they have stores, there." Because so many people in western Europe speak English nowadays, there is rarely a language barrier (this makes me a little wistful, since I like the challenge of foreign travel, and that challenge feels non-existent in many ways now). I'm better at navigating airports and subways and train stations these days. I know that I'll find my way somehow, and that if I get lost, it will be temporary. I'm also better at traveling because of this new thing campaign of mine. Embracing new things has helped me be a bit more adventurous, but it has also helped me to see (sometimes, at least) the new thing behind every travel foible; more accurately, perhaps, it's helped me to see the story that can emerge from my worst travel moments, and that makes it all okay. If it can become a blog entry or a story to be told, I'll endure it. It's not like I have any choice.
So what did I endure this trip when it came to the ins and outs of travel? Well, I already blogged about the ordeal of finding out that the airline we were supposed to fly to Stockholm on went out of business. Besides that, I would say that my long trip home took some endurance. Paul and I got to the Oslo Airport by about 5am on Sunday morning, all set to board our 6:30 Air France flight to Paris. Sadly, Air France had other ideas. The flight was cancelled for mechanical reasons, so Paul and I stood in line for two hours waiting to be reticketed, this time on the same United flight Dwight and Cindy were taking to Newark, NJ. That flight went off without a hitch, but luck was not on our side. When we got to Newark, we learned that our flight to Cincinnati had been cancelled for mechanical reasons, too! The lovely woman at the Delta desk helped us both reschedule on a later flight on United, but this meant that we had to reclaim our luggage and go through security again.
We sat around for a few hours, and started to see other flights being canceled at the gates surrounding us. Bad weather was hitting the Midwest and east coast. At our gate, an agent announced that our flight would be delayed--our plane had just left Pittsburgh bound for Newark. We were frustrated, but what could we do? We found Dwight and Cindy a few gates away in the same predicament waiting for their flight to Louisville. I don't know what time it happened--maybe around 10pm, but our flight was cancelled and there were no more that night. We lined up once more for reticketing. Paul got on a 5:30pm flight the next day, but I was scheduled for the 7:30pm flight. Dwight and Cindy had to wait quite a while, but they finally flew out that night and arrived in Louisville after midnight.
Paul and I found rooms at the airport hotel, and I was so delighted to have a comfy, king-sized bed, that I almost didn't care that I had no clean clothes, no deodorant, no toothbrush. It wasn't until the next that Paul reminded me that the hotel had some toiletries available for travelers in our situation. I was perfectly happy in my enormous American hotel room with its king sized bed, bigger than my entire room in Copenhagen, but check out was a noon, so I had a long day at the airport. I found some relatively comfy spots to blog in at the airport, rode the air train from terminal to terminal for "fun," ate lunch, drank coffee, and blogged some more. And then, eventually, I flew home, thirty six hours after I was originally scheduled to arrive.
I spent a couple hundred dollars more than I needed to because if these delays, but in the end, it was no big deal. Don't get me wrong--I was cranky. But I didn't flip out over the incident. Traveling without anxiety is my version of traveling light. That's a big new thing.
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