Travel mishaps

Last weekend, Cheyenne and I took a quick trip to Toronto with her parents to see the musical “Wicked” and visit Niagara Falls. The trip itself was great, but our time at the airport reminded me of a number of travel mishaps I’ve experienced the past few years.

This Sunday, after driving from Toronto to Chicago, our flight to Des Moines was delayed until 10:30 p.m. While things certainly could have been worse, it’s not fun knowing you have an extra couple of hours at the airport, or that you won’t get back to your bed until after 1 a.m.

Annoyed and tired, we were happy to at least be stuck in a large airport, with much more to see than somewhere like the Des Moines International Airport. If you ever get stuck at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, here’s a couple things to help your boredom:

-In Terminal 1, Concourse B, the Field Museum of Natural History has a small gift shop and a life-size recreation of a Brachiosaurus on display.

-Connecting two parts of Terminal 1 is a tunnel that goes under the tarmac. There’s not a ton going on there, but it’s a little cooler there and there are colorful lights covering the ceiling.

-In a small corner of Terminal 2, immediately next to the hallway connecting Terminal 1 and 2, is a Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat and small exhibit on WWII veteran Butch O’Hare.

-In Terminal 3, Concourse K, is the Hall of Flags, where a large globe is lit up, surrounded by flags from about 20 different countries.

These are just the things we checked out last weekend. There’s plenty of other small art of museum exhibits, as well as a yoga studio and USO in Terminal 3.

Between our books and all these things, our time at the airport was pretty smooth, despite our tiredness. However, it hasn’t always gone that way for me.

I’ve spoken plenty of times about my travels and adventures when studying abroad. Generally, I focus on the positives, but it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

Whenever media depicts someone having a bad day in the city, there’s always one of those water splashing scenes. You’re walking along the sidewalk after a heavy rain when a car passes you, hitting a massive puddle just perfectly and covering you from head to toe in dirty water.

I’d never heard of it actually happening to someone outside of a movie, yet on a trip to Sevilla, Spain, I got to experience that firsthand. Luckily it was on the tail-end of the day, but it certainly made for a wet and crabby evening for myself.

A little bit later, I took a trip to Madrid with two other students. We thoroughly enjoyed our time, but we almost didn’t make it back to Valladolid, where we were living. We knew we were cutting it a little close timing wise as we power-walked to the bus station. Technically we were on time. Public transport in Europe is very timely, but our bus decided to be a little impatient and left two minutes before the scheduled departure time.

If it had waited those last two minutes, we would have made it. Instead, we watched it pull out of the station as we arrived. Now what? We pulled up the train schedule, and found only one more train leaving for Valladolid. We had 30 minutes to jump in a cab and get on the train, or else we were stuck in Madrid. We did end up making it and even got home earlier than planned, but the added stress and money spent certainly wasn’t fun.

And then of course there was my trip to Paris. Though it was my one of my best solo trips I took, both my arrival and departure at Charles-de-Gaulle airport took years off my life. I had a Spanish SIM card during that time, and normally had a few days of free data when traveling. However, when I arrived in Paris, the data wasn’t working and my phone wasn’t connecting to the airport Wifi. I generally knew where my hostel was, but didn’t know exactly how to get there. And everyone was speaking French. Eventually I did get semi-helpful directions and got on the correct train.

Leaving Paris was better, but still not fun. I got to the airport in a timely fashion and was at the correct gate when I got a notification that the flight was delayed. Fine, I figured I’d find some food and spend a few hours chilling by myself. An hour later, I check the board and the delay was changed again. My plane was boarding immediately. I made the flight and got back, but firmly believe if a flight is heavily delayed, the airport shouldn’t be able to un-delay it. I would have missed the flight if I wasn’t paying close attention.

So yeah, traveling sucks sometimes, but I’ve found it’s always been worth it.