Category: Murphy’s Law of Transportation

Route 2: The Highway That Was My Personal Obstacle Course

Posted on by Kai Raine

It’s been a long time since I blogged a travel story. All my Murphy’s Law of Transportation stories so far have been about public transportation, so today I’d like to talk about the

This coming week my sister’s moving out of the apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts where she lived for her college career. I spent a large chunk of the last two years living with our aunt and grandparents in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, so I got to visit her semi-regularly. The trip between the two towns was pretty straightforward, but typically took about an hour and a half, though it could be longer with traffic. Most of that trip was spent driving on Route 2.

How I loathed Route 2.

For some reason, for the first year, one of every two ventures I made out to Amherst featured nerve-wracking moments. On Route 2, where the speed limit is 55mph, but everyone typically seems to drive at 70-75mph.

Random tangent: I’m guessing that traffic slows down when the weather is bad. My trips were always voluntary, so I never made the drive when the weather looked like it might make things difficult. After leaving Route 2, there was another 30+ minutes of driving on windy, hilly roads in the middle of nowhere. The prospect of ice and rain was not a welcoming one on these roads. I have made the trip out of Amherst in bad weather, but not the trip to Amherst. Which is what this post is about.

The stress of these events—3 of which I remember vividly—contributed to my stress at the prospect of making the drive, making my trips out to Amherst less frequent than I had expected them to be.

Incident #1

The first incident happened during maybe my second or third drive to Amherst, when I was still not quite sure of the roads. There was a lot of traffic that day, but going quite fast. I was in the row of cars in the left lane.

(Route 2 is a 2-lane highway for most of this trip, except the last stretch where it became a 1-lane highway. Yes, the left lane is supposed to be for overtaking, but when there are people stubbornly doing the speed limit, the left lane becomes the 70mph travel lane, while the right lane is the 55mph travel lane.)

The car in front of me was a bigger car than mine. (Not unusual. I drove a 2-door VW GTI.)

In front of that car was a big truck. You know, one of those gigantic things.

So that’s the scene: me in my little car, on an unfamiliar highway that goes on forever. I just have time to see something red by the truck’s tires when the car in front of me swerves.

Now, I learned to drive in Germany, where it was strictly drilled into me to never swerve when startled. I was taught to break.

So I don’t swerve. But I can’t break suddenly either, because the car behind me is quite close. I break, but slowly. I just have time to register that it was one of those bright red plastic fuel containers, and then I’ve driven over it. (Between the wheels, at least.) I hear it dragging for a few seconds, then I hear it release. In the rearview mirror, I see the car behind me swerve, but not enough, and catch the container under itself, too.

When I got back to my grandparents’, I took the car to a local mechanic just to check that I hadn’t hurt anything. He was very nice, checking the car and reassuring me that there was no damage at no charge.

Incident #2

This time, I was relatively accustomed to the drive. But the gas container incident hadn’t quite faded from my memory on the day that I was driving down Route 2, again in the left lane, again in traffic.

Around the same place where the gas container incident had happened, again I encountered an obstacle! This time, it was a white plastic trash bin, lying across the left half of the lane.

Luckily, everyone was swerving around it so it was visible a good few seconds beforehand, rather than coming out of nowhere. The cars in the right lane were spaced far enough apart that this was not too difficult.

Incident #3

By this point, the it had become a bit on an inside joke among my friends that Route 2 was my personal obstacle course.

I was also growing more confident in my driving. After all, if I’d managed not to get into an accident so far, I was doing pretty well. So my guard was perhaps a little bit lowered one sunny day.

I drove without incident past the areas where I’d formerly encountered obstacles. Traffic was sparser than usual, but both lanes were moving fast: probably 65-70mph.

I was more than half way through my course on Route 2 when I rounded a corner and saw, just a split second before I had to react…

A couch.

Sitting there blocking off 2/3 of the left side of the right lane was a couch. Not lying sideways or anything, no. It was upright, looking perfectly comfy and innocent.

Fortunately, being in the left lane (as usual), I only had to veer to the leftmost side of my lane to avoid the couch.

People in the right lane were swerving into the shoulder, and I’ve never been so relieved to see that there was a shoulder to the highway. (Sections of this highway don’t have a shoulder; had this happened in any of those places, this would have undoubtably resulted in a massive pile-up.)

In summary: driving is dangerous, but I’ve somehow been extremely lucky.

My Longest Flight and Longest Night

Posted on by Kai Raine

When my family was living in India and I was attending university in Alaska, I usually had to take a minimum of five flights to get from the start of the trip to the end. After my first semester, when we booked my flights around the semester and then had to pay booking change fees when we knew my exam schedules, my mother decided to send me back to Alaska on a one-way ticket so that we could book the next round trips around my vacations rather than around my semesters. That one-way trip was the only time when I had only four flights, and it was a terrible experience.

My route went as follows: a domestic flight from Hyderabad to Delhi, followed by an excruciatingly long flight from Delhi to LA (via London, where it stopped for fuel). From there I was to fly to Fairbanks via Seattle.

Since I was a child, I had loved long flights. I loved the chance to watch movie after movie or immerse myself in a book, and later, once I had my own computer, to do whatever I liked for a hours at a time with no distraction except flight attendants bringing drinks and food.

This flight was long enough to put a dent in my enjoyment. For one thing, there was no personal entertainment system. Normally, this was endurable; this flight, however, was nearly 24 hours in duration.

It was, unfortunately, made even longer by the fact that we were delayed several hours.

Worse still, after we landed in LA, it took me a solid two more hours to make my way through the slow-moving, pushy line of immigration (just the memory is enough to inspire gratitude for those automatic terminals that they’ve been using for the last few years).

Naturally, by the time that I made it through immigration, it was four or five hours after I was supposed to have landed, and my connecting flight had gone. There was a line of people being rebooked before they went out of customs, so I joined the line and waited another hour.

Of course, once I reached the front of the line, I was informed that because Air India had nothing to do with Alaska Airlines and my tickets had been booked separately, I had to go talk to Alaska Airlines instead.

Air India and Alaska Airlines were two terminals apart, and the terminal in the middle was under construction, and therefore deserted and dark as I rushed through it, ignoring the shadows in my imagination.

Naturally, Alaska Airlines informed me that because they were not affiliated with Air India, they were not responsible for my delay and I would have to rebook. After running back and forth through the deserted terminal and even (out of sheer desperation) trying tearing up and declaring, “But I’m only seventeen, I’m a Minor!” I could elicit no sympathy. At last I conceded and rebooked—for the next morning.

I contacted my mother and let her know, as a friend of hers was supposed to meet me in Seattle. She asked me if I wanted her to contact a friend of hers who lived in LA, who was my sister’s godmother. I told her that it was only eight hours or so, hoping that she would insist. She didn’t, and merely wished me a good night. I said goodbye and hung up so that she wouldn’t hear how my throat was closing and my eyes were filling with tears.

I had a large backpack, a computer bag and a large suitcase. I felt a marrow-deep exhaustion that I’d never experienced before, much less from a plane trip. I saw people sleeping in seats, huddled around their bags to keep them from being stolen in their sleep. The terminal was deadly silent, except for the occasional snort or snore. Occasionally, I would see someone laying on their side with their eyes open, following me as I walked, and I felt terrified. I tried to arrange myself and my bags in a seat to sleep, but my suitcase and backpack were too large for me to keep a hold on them. I could do one or the other, but not both.

The fear mounted with my exhaustion, so I went to the bathroom. I locked myself in the handicapped stall, left my suitcase and backpack against the wall and hung my laptop bag on the hook, and sat on the toilet and tried to sleep. It was by far more comfortable than any location I’d tried before, but every sound of a person entering the bathroom startled me into waking and I wasn’t resting at all.

After half an hour that felt like a day, I gave up and wandered around with my bags until at last, I found an outlet in a hallway with no seats at all. Perching myself on top of the heating vent, I called my mother’s friend in Seattle.

She talked with me for perhaps half an hour or an hour, until my phone was running low on battery (I couldn’t charge it and talk at the same time). I felt safe while I was on the phone, and was terrified to hang up, lest the exhaustion and the terror come rushing back. Fortunately, it didn’t. I plugged in my laptop and wrote stories until the dawn finally arrived and the terminal started groggily coming back to life.

I had a croissant and slept on my flight to Seattle, where I ran into a friend from university and my mother’s friend came to meet me for a scant half hour or so before I had to go back through security to my next flight. I was (somehow) perfectly chipper and energetic by then.

(But on occasion, the thought of flying into LA still fills me with a sort of remembered sense of horror.)

Congratulations, You’re a Mother! Wait, What?

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I was sixteen going on seventeen, my family made one long, extensive trip to see many of our family and friends in Japan and the US. Because my parents had work and therefore less flexible schedules, they returned home to India first. But my sisters and I wanted more time on the trip, and our parents agreed that we could return a little later.

We would be flying back to Hyderabad from Chicago, with an overnight layover in Singapore. My mother had a friend in Singapore who would be meeting us there and taking us to the hotel where we’d be staying the night, then back to the airport in the morning. This was my first time flying alone without the unaccompanied minor service, though I don’t remember if this was because my parents had conceded to my argument that I was well-traveled enough to render it pointless, or because whichever airline we were using considered me too old to qualify. Either way, I was in charge with my twelve-year-old sisters in tow.

Our last stop was with my Italian godfather who lives in Chicago, who defies the combined stereotypes about Italians, godfathers and Chicago by leading a perfectly ordinary life and being a perfectly lovely person.* My godfather took us to the airport. He had intended to come through security with us, but they would not allow him through because his keys were too pointy; they also could not hold onto his keys for him, and of course he couldn’t simply abandon his keys. So we said our farewells at security and my sisters and I headed to our gate.

When we reached the gate, they were announcing that the flight was overbooked and asking everyone to come to the counter to check their bookings. I told my sisters to take a seat and took our boarding passes and passports to the counter. They asked me if we would be willing to rebook to fly to Singapore via Tokyo instead of Hong Kong.

I probably should have flatly said no, but the prospect of Japan was a lure of incomparable allure to me. Sure, we’d only been to Japan a few weeks prior. But I hadn’t been back for 3 years prior to that (it felt like an eternity at the time—how naive I was), and I didn’t know when I’d get to go back again (not for another 9 years, as it turned out). Even if we were only in the airport, even if it was only an hour or two, wouldn’t it be nice just to be able to speak Japanese a little more?

The lady behind the counter saw my hesitation and pounced. She spoke of vouchers to give us significant discounts off our next flights.

“Someone’s meeting us in Singapore,” I explained to her. “I don’t know how to contact him. We have to arrive at the time we said we would.”

“That’s not a problem,” she assured me. “The flight from Tokyo only arrives five minutes later than your current booking.”

I was still hesitant.

“I can give you seats together on the other flight,” she continued to hedge. “You would have to be seated separately otherwise.”

I folded.

I had one other reason for conceding. The flight was supposed to have the sort of layover in Hong Kong where some passengers disembarked and some new passengers embarked while the plane refueled, but everyone heading onwards to Singapore remained on the plane. My sisters were extremely susceptible to motion sickness, and a part of me thought that maybe it would be better if it was two shorter flights with a break to walk around an airport in the middle than to have one long flight with a break in which we had to remain in our seats. Whether or not I consulted my sisters’ opinions I don’t remember; but I suspect that in my teenage arrogance, I made the decision unilaterally.

She reprinted our boarding passes, gave me 3 discount vouchers and belatedly informed me that we had to hurry as the other flight was already boarding. So it was: all the way on the other side of the airport.

So I collected my sisters and we ran through the airport, back through the illuminated tunnel and reached our gate just as they were boarding the last stragglers. There we encountered a hitch: the lady who had reprinted our boarding passes had misprinted them. She had printed one of my sister’s names twice, and the other one not at all. After some brief confusion, the flight attendant realized that there were, indeed, 3 seats among us even if there were only 2 names. She let us on.

Once we reached Tokyo, I took the boarding passes to get reprinted with the correct name. We hung about in bookstores and concession stands in the airport while we waited for our connecting flight. My sisters were already not feeling well. After an objectively underwhelming, subjectively tantalizing hour or two in Tokyo, we boarded our next flight.

After we had boarded, one of my sisters informed me that she felt sick. The other one added that she did, too. I pushed the flight attendant call button. When the flight attendant arrived, I asked her if she had any sort of medication for motion sickness. There was a flurry of activity as flight attendants conferred with each other and peered with concern at my sisters, who were looking distinctly unwell. In particular one English-speaking man and one Japanese-speaking woman kept coming and asking more questions and expressing different concerns.

They had no medication, and there was talk of letting us off the plane if my sisters were too sick to fly. But my sisters decided that they could brave the trip and we took off, though the two flight attendants continued to keep an eye on us.

Now, as I have mentioned before, I looked far older than my age. (“She’s looked 32 since she was 12,” my mother used to say.) Meanwhile, my sisters did and still do look far younger than their age. They still tell me countless stories of odd looks and incredulous comments that they receive when trying to purchase alcohol, despite being over the legal age limit.

I had never specified to either flight attendant that these were my sisters, and in the stress of sitting between two ashen sisters, it didn’t occur to me to wonder at all the questions the Japanese-speaking stewardess was asking me about the difficulties of twins until she asked, “Is their father still around?”

I blinked. “Yes,” I said. At last it dawned on me that she thought I was their mother.

I continued conversing with her without missing a beat. Though I don’t recall outright lying, I never outright informed her that no, these were in fact my sisters, and she never seemed to catch on.

When we eventually landed, we were among the last to disembark, and then we all went to the bathroom. This meant that we were among the last to leave the secure area for our flight, and all passengers from the Hong Kong flight were long gone. Our mother’s friend had apparently been frantically calling our mother (who expressed a complete lack of concern and assured him that fifteen minutes was hardly cause for concern) and asking the airport personnel for information.

This adventure quickly rose to the ranks among favorite dinner table conversations in our family.

*Because this is the internet, I feel that I must make it absolutely clear that this is a joke: I don’t subscribe to any stereotypes about Italians, godfathers, Chicago or any combination thereof. My godfather, meanwhile, is in fact a perfectly lovely person.

Reluctant Unaccompanied Minor, Forgotten

Posted on by Kai Raine

My mother has frequently joked that I’ve looked 32 since I was 12. (When I turned 24, I joked that by my mother’s own logic I was now 64 and the oldest member of our family. One of my sisters objected that I was misunderstanding: I stagnated at 32 at the age of 12, she said, and therefore was still 32.)

At the age of 14, I lived in Buffalo with my mother’s parents and my family lived in Hyderabad, India. I naturally visited them once or twice, traveling as an unaccompanied minor. Though this was only a trip I made once as a round trip, and then once more as a one-way trip to join my family, it was never unremarkable.

The preferred route in those days between Hyderabad and Buffalo was Buffalo -> JFK in New York -> London -> Doha or Dubai -> Hyderabad. I always ended up having long layovers, and it was excruciating. The only place where I didn’t mind being stuck for awhile was JFK, where there was a play room of sorts for unaccompanied minors: there were puzzles, a TV equipped with a playstation, various games and a few books. So of course, JFK was the only airport where I never spent any particularly long amount of time waiting between flights.

In London, I once missed my flight out of Heathrow due to a delay, and they rebooked everyone for a different flight that departed the next day and put them up in hotels for the night. But much to their distress, this was not an option for me. (Apparently it’s against policy to put an unaccompanied minor into a hotel.) They eventually settled on putting me on a different flight that left several hours later out of Gatwick. After a long, traffic-heavy trip in an airline-owned car to Gatwick with a flight attendant, I was handed off to a different flight attendant. Still, I had several hours to wait for my flight. The flight attendant explained apologetically to me that policy dictated that I had to stay with her, but they had only a tiny staff kitchen where I could sit for those hours. She told me that she would trust me to go out into the airport and come back by a designated time, and let me leave the area. I wandered around the small airport until I got bored, then spent the rest of the layover in that staff kitchen reading. (And wishing they would have just let me stay in a hotel like all the other people.)

International flights to and from Doha now principally go to and from Hamad International Airport, but at the time Doha International Airport was the default airport. This was a relatively tiny airport. Like Gatwick, they did not have a room for us unaccompanied minors. Unlike Gatwick, they didn’t even have a staff room.

I and a boy a few years younger than me, obsessed with drawing dragons in his sketchbook, were sat on the floor behind a desk at a gate while the flight attendant charged with our care manned the desk. (To be clear, neither of us was taking this flight. We sat on the floor behind the gate until a flight attendant from our connecting flight came to collect one of us and take us to our gate.)

Adding to all of this, nearly every time I was handed from one flight attendant to the next, they’d eye me strangely and ask, “You’re a minor? Really?” To which I or the previous flight attendant would say that I was fourteen and be met with shock.

To put it simply, I was not happy that I had to travel as an unaccompanied minor. Since it was a service that my parents had to request, the first time when it was a round trip, I begged them not to request it on the return trip.

“I look plenty old enough,” I argued. “I’ll be fine.”

They begged to differ, and I was again an unaccompanied minor.

On the one-way trip to India, I again begged them not to request the service, and again they decided that it was necessary. As usual, flight attendants were incredulous to hear that I was an unaccompanied minor.

From London to Doha, I was flying with 3 other, much younger children as unaccompanied minors. We were put on the plane early, and then told to wait at the front of the plane without disembarking after it landed. I did as I was told. The other children disembarked one by one as their parents showed up accompanied by flight attendants.

I stood there, waiting to be led to my connecting flight. The flight attendants kept eyeing me in a way that seemed a lot like annoyance. After the last child left and I found myself still locked in a staring match with a flight attendant, I realized that they did not remember that I had been one of the unaccompanied minors handed over to them. They were waiting for me to disembark, no doubt wondering why I’d been idly standing near the children.

I didn’t say a word and disembarked.

I revelled in getting to walk around Doha airport, going where I pleased and sitting in actual chairs, wherever I wanted.

When I arrived in Hyderabad, my father was surprised when I emerged without any escort. I explained that the airline had forgotten that I was an unaccompanied minor in Doha, but everything worked out, see? This was why there was no point sending me as an unaccompanied minor.

It was a moot point by then, but they never sent me as an unaccompanied minor again.

The Living Murphy’s Law of Transportation: Introduction

Posted on by Kai Raine

For about a decade from my early teens into my early twenties, I was the living embodiment of Murphy’s law when it came to transportation. Though I traveled a great deal in those years, I rarely had any trips that simply went as planned. It came to a point where my sisters would flat out refuse to travel with me, citing the fact that somehow my travel was always characterized by delays, cancellations and a great deal of unplanned inconvenience.

During these years, this was a routine icebreaker and dinner table conversation. The stories always made for great stories and a lot of laughter, and I had more than I could count. Many times, people told me I should write down the stories. I never did. A part of me was convinced that it was more or less a routine part of travel, and people who didn’t encounter these problems probably simply weren’t traveling enough.

Of course, my travel was frequently intercontinental. The longest stories came from journeys going home or to university before and after vacations. This was always a very convoluted trip, because the cheapest way was to fly across 3 continents in a minimum of 5 flights. Yet even when this was no longer the case, when I lived in Europe and would be visiting family only one or two countries away, odd complications continued to plague my travel for a few years.

At one point, I remember thinking that I really should write some of the stories down. I looked back on the recent trips I’d had and trying to work out which to begin telling. Then, suddenly, a thought occurred to me and I changed my mind. Instead, I started filtering through my memory for a single trip that had gone relatively smoothly—something that wasn’t any worse than a delay, I thought. I couldn’t remember any such trip recently.

People would talk about the annoyances of a one-hour delay that caused them to miss a flight, and I’d bite my tongue and wonder how they could possibly have been so confident in their flights being on time as to book a layover so tight that a one-hour delay would cause them to miss the connection. (At this point in my life, my minimum layover time was three hours.)

In the end, I didn’t write any of the stories down. I kept on coming up with new stories, and I told them so frequently that I didn’t see why I’d ever need them to be written down.

Then, three or four years ago, things suddenly settled down and I stopped having such problems. Now I book my flights with one- or two-hour layovers and hope for the best—and I haven’t missed a flight yet. (Excepting the one time that I misplaced my passport…)

But now I find myself thinking back to those stories and realizing that all the chaos and all the inconvenience really was very much out of the ordinary. The sheer frequency with which I wound up stuck in places where I had not intended to end up at all is, in retrospect, funnier than ever.

So now that I’m blogging about travel stories, I created a series focusing on these stories. I’m certain that I won’t be able to remember them all. But I’ll start telling the stories as best I can remember.

If you have your own crazy travel story, do post it in the comments! I love hearing other people’s travel stories even more than I enjoy telling my own!