Smiling Through Travel Delays and Not-Quite-Disasters

It’s strange, after I return from a trip it’s always the stories about mishaps and near-misses that I find myself re-telling again and again. Maybe it’s because everyone likes a funny anecdote, or maybe it’s just easier to joke about the horror of that filthy truck stop bathroom in Turkey than it is to explain how I felt about the sunrise I’d just seen hours earlier over some ancient Greek ruins.

In any case, I rang in 2008 by surviving my share of the holiday travel crazies. I spent 21 hours (instead of the usual 12) getting from New York City back to my home in Ottawa – a sequence of events that included a broken rail on the train tracks in Middle-of-Nowhere, NY, not one but two passengers being escorted off the train at Customs and Immigration, an armed Customs officer slicing one man’s seat into pieces (literally) and pulling out wall panels in the train carriage in search of contraband, and finally, a speeding taxi chase through the snowed-in streets of Montreal, trying to catch the last bus back to Ottawa or face the consequences: a night spent on the floor of the Greyhound station.

(We made the bus with three minutes to spare. It was then delayed for an hour by the snow storm.)

In case you can’t tell, I enjoyed myself immensely. Travel delays and mishaps are inevitable, and there’s just no sense getting upset about them. Make it into a game: bet with fellow passengers on how many more things can go wrong, or start a Top Ten list, Letterman-style, of your worst transit experiences. This one ranks around fifth on my list, I think – remind me to tell you sometime about my #1, the six-hour flight from Montreal to London that managed to last for 48 hours…