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!