This summer I have lucked out: travel has been a breeze, especially by plane. No missed flights, connections were neither too long nor too short, my bags always got where I was going. Quite surprising for the quantity of travel I've been doing - by 4:00 pm tomorrow I'll have flown all the way around the world. Train travel was slightly less smooth (a suicide on the tracks from Nice to Paris, a strike or two, and a suspicious suitcase that the French police destroyed with a controlled explosion in Paris Nord station), but that's life.
In short, I had near perfect faith in national and international transportation. Airlines lost luggage, delayed and canceled flights, but none of that ever happened to me. I was blithely indifferent and unaware.
Until today.
I nearly cried (and that's saying something - my emotive powers are poor) when Carlos at the International Transfers desk informed me in his thick Spanish accent that my flight to Dallas-Ft. Worth was canceled, and that there was no possibility of a connecting flight to Salt Lake until tomorrow morning, and further that it was too much of a hassle to get my checked luggage.
... So I'm sitting in an airport hotel room outside London Heathrow with no deodorant or toothbrush to speak of (all checked! So trusting...), alternately napping, reading Life of Pi (which I'm immensely enjoying), and using up the precious battery of my computer (oh, did I mention I left my charger in the Netherlands? No worry, it'll come along sometime later this week in my friend Jeff's luggage).
I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer. I learned last year to take this attitude towards travel hang-ups: "Hey, wow! Another adventure! This is going to be fun."
So I'll grit my teeth and smile. What's another day's delay after four months away? Also, that rhymes, which makes it even better.
