It is, of course, a tiny miracle that you can hop into a giant glob of metal and electronics and find yourself in another part of the world a few hours later. Flying! What a concept. But that doesn't make airport travel, especially when it goes awry, any less stressful.
More often than not, you board a flight and it goes where it needs to go! But when it doesn't, or it only goes where it needs to go much later than it was supposed to, you can feel helpless, stranded, and unsure what to do next. The "helpless" part is the one that hits the most; in most cases, it's out of your hands and help feels at arm's length.
Which brings us to this week's letter series, where Patrick recounts a high-wire act in trying to return from relaxation, while Rob looks into the past, and remembers a harrowing journey from Stockholm to Boston.
Snow! Connections! Other languages! Drama!
Hey, at least we're both home right now!
Patrick: I think last weekend was the most stressed I’ve been traveling in a good minute, Rob.
The basic setup: we traveled to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico to celebrate a friend’s 40th this past weekend. The house we rented—and Cabo San Lucas in general—was nowhere near the unrest during the past few weeks in the region. Deep in what I can only describe as rich suburbia, we planted our asses down in a house I could never afford and drank beer by a pool.
On the way back, my wife was headed on a work trip, while I ventured home to relieve a tired grandmother from watching our kids. One of which, of course, got sick while we were away.
As she waved goodbye, my flight went from on time to slightly delayed. Then, slightly delayed a little further. And then pushed back two hours. At which point, what I can only describe as nervous whispers began between everyone waiting for the flight, unsure what to do next. The first wave of people walking up to the service counter made sense: folks who had a connecting flight that was clearly no longer going to happen. Most everyone else, though, was staying put.
I needed to be home for my kids but a delay was not catastrophic. I had plenty of work to do and games to play. But it was when I saw one couple frantically whisper to another couple, prompting them to rush towards the counter that I worked up the bravery to ask what they knew.
Their response, said with the same tone of George W. Bush learning about the second tower while reading to a room with children, was simple: “I overheard them say the plane is broken.”
It’s at that point that I walked my ass to the increasingly long line for the service counter, too, even if all I had to work with was random hearsay from a person I hadn’t met until this moment. A few others joined us, too, and created a weird psychological effect in the room. Uh, should you be nervous, too? Why are more people getting in line when nothing has been announced?
The line moved slowly, each ticket change taking anywhere from five to 20 minutes. Along the way, someone from American Airlines announced “the plane is still being worked on,” a statement that seemed to have the opposite intended effect, as more people hopped into line.
Each minute that ticked by took me one step closer to the front. But each minute also brought me closer to my flight’s delayed departure time. Could I have my cake and eat it, too? If I changed my flight but the original flight was actually going to leave, could I switch back? I pitched this to someone who was walking away with a new ticket and told it wasn’t possible.
Even worse, there was a consensus flight that everyone was trying to get on, one that would route you to Dallas for a distressingly quick connecting flight, but one that would have you in Chicago a little after midnight. Ideal? No. But you’d be able to sleep in your own bed that night.
The only problem, Rob, was there were only a few seats. I started counting the people in front of me, spread across two lines and two separate service counters. Would I make the cutoff?
I eventually reached the front and was handed updated tickets five minutes before the original flight was supposed to start boarding. I was making the smart move. The practical move. But I will not lie, I nearly burst into tears when I saw a bus approaching the terminal, seemingly preparing to start taking people to the plane. A cruel joke, playing out right in front of me. You saw eyes go wide in the waiting area, as people clutched their bags and prepared to stand up.
Instead, the bus was merely using that gate to turn around. You could hear a pin drop.
The flight to Dallas was uneventful, until we approached the gate and were told the plane had to find another one. 90 minutes to catch a connecting flight, one that would require moving through customs and boarding an in-airport train to another terminal, turned into 60 minutes. 45. 30.
Fuck.
I sprinted out of the plane, rushed up stairs instead of using escalators, and cursed the TSA agent who demanded I take out every electronic device—Switch 2, Steam Deck, iPad, laptop—and place them in separate bins. The same agent who also briefly misplaced my passport, only for said passport to magically appear moments later on the scanning belt.
Eventually, I spotted a young couple who’d been in the same line with me back in Cabo San Lucas, as we all decided to take a chance on the flight to Dallas. We exchanged a nod, and I used them as a goddamn video game waypoint marker to the gate, following in their wake. It was a way of reducing my own anxiety and having nowhere to project it other than my brain.
The flight was mid-boarding when we arrived. It left without fuss. I arrived in Chicago a little before one, and was home about an hour later. My nine-year-old had made a bed in her room, expecting I’d be sleeping with her. I laid down, passed out, and was happy for this to be over.
The next day, I saw my original flight was cancelled. I’d made the right decision.
Rob, what’s your worst travel story?
Rob: Oh this is easy. And timely, given that I just spent a week buried under a blizzard and my entire body still feels slightly shattered from all the shoveling and roof-raking I did. See, this is the worst winter the Boston area has had since the Snowpocalypse of 2015.
You may remember this a bit. In the early weeks of 2015, Boston was hit by a series of blizzards that arrived almost like clockwork every week or so. Any one of them would have been a memorable snow. All of them in sequence exceeded the city's capacity to deal with it. In June or July, the snow mountain that had been dumped out by the BCEC where they hold PAX East was still melting. When the second storm hit I took one look at my 1999 Toyota Camry buried under 16 inches of snow and trapped behind a five foot embankment created by the plows and decided I didn't need to drive until spring. The car melted free in May and turned on without a hitch. I felt very smug, given that the rest of Central Square had descended into near-violence over the parking spaces people kept digging out of the ever-shrinking roadways.
Anyway, sometime after blizzard number three I went to Stockholm for a Paradox event. Now your options for getting to Stockholm are kind of limited from the US. It's a smaller European city and not a major air travel hub at all, so most routes will have you taking a connection or two. Or there's Icelandair, a decent airline that functions as a pretty incredible tollway on trans-Atlantic air traffic to Scandinavia. Because back then, every Icelandair route had a stopover in Iceland to catch a connection and maybe you spend some money on the island while you are there.
Toward the end of my visit in Stockholm, I saw that Boston was about to get hit with another blizzard. The day it was time to leave, I almost asked to change my itinerary because I knew they were going to shut down Logan Airport. The storm's timing was starting to line up perfectly with my arrival.
But until this trip, I'd never really had any problems with airlines. Never had a cancelled flight, never got diverted. So I was complacent. How bad could this go? I asked at the Icelandair desk in Stockholm whether they were still able to land in Boston and they confidently told me that Logan was still open and they didn't anticipate any problems.
Cut to me landing in Iceland a few hours later. Logan Airport was closed due to weather, my flight was cancelled. But, okay, not a big deal. They had three or four flights going to Logan each day. I'd just catch one of the next ones. Au contraire. All those flights were sold out, and the few seats that had been available had already been snapped up by other passengers on my flight. The next flight they could promise me a seat on was in six days. There was also a huge classical music festival in Reykjavik that week, and there were absolutely no hotels available in the city.
They were very apologetic but said there were rooms available near the airport in Keflavik that they'd put me up in for free. This… didn't sound so bad. A few days or even a week in Iceland? I mean I was flat broke and couldn't really live it up while I was there, but my last time there had convinced me it's one of those places that is basically heaven on earth.
To paraphrase Jason Molina, even heaven needs a place to throw all the shit. For Iceland, Keflavik appears to be that place, with its proximity to both the airport and the US airbase and the attendant industrial and warehouse capacity those facilities imply. Me and a bunch of increasingly shell-shocked American travelers were loaded onto a bus and driven through an ice storm to one of the grimmest motels I have ever seen. Made largely of pre-fab modules, my room was basically a cell with a bed and the bathroom was… basically a waterproofed cube with a showerhead cut into the top of it and a slow drain on the floor a few feet away from the toilet and sink. Outside, through whipping snow, I could glimpse the dim lights of a distant KFC and a gas station. Want to go to Reykjavik? Prepare for an expensive cab ride or take the shuttle that leaves once per day.
I lasted a day. The weather was foul, and I was far too broke to find much to do in the city, where everything is expensive due to the usual costs of supplying an island, and the seven hours of hazy daylight pushed me indoors and eventually back to my dire little room. Once I got there, I called the airline and begged them to get me out of there. No dice. Nothing to Boston, or eventually connecting to Boston. The way it was explained to me later, Icelandair doesn't have a lot of extra capacity. Even a single canceled flight can cause lengthy rebooking delays. Multiple flights canceled? Those people are just out of luck. The airline is going to maintain its schedule for all its other customers and address the stranded travelers when it can.
"Well what about New York? Can you get me to New York?" I begged, staring at (the apparently daily?) ice storm whipping across the roadway.
A pause. "Yes, sir, we could" replied a woman whose incredibly beautiful voice was almost certainly the reason she had a job basically telling people they were utterly out of luck and there is nothing the airline can do to help them. "But you do realize, you would be responsible for getting yourself to Boston? If you decide you would like to have us rebook you on a flight to New York, that would be the end of our obligation to you."
"Yes, that's fine. I can handle that part. Just… what is the fastest way you can get me to New York?"
0515 Greenwich Mean Time (12:15 AM Eastern), Keflavik. I am part of a long column of exhausted travelers picking their way across fifty yards of tarmac towards an aircraft that is too big for any of the gates at the airport. There's no snow, but something I'd describe as a North Atlantic gale is still blowing itself out. I am wearing a wood coat, gloves, sweater, long underwear, and sweats. I may as well be naked. My eyes water as I cast my gaze to the door of the plane and see a writhing mass of souls attempting to gain entrance up the stairway, while the rest of us huddle miserably beneath the arclights of the airfield. We are bound for Manchester, then Heathrow. I am just three or four hours from Boston. I will not be home for 24.
1400 GMT (9 AM Eastern), Heathrow. Somehow, we are late. We were sitting too long in Manchester, we had trouble getting a gate, and now I am sprinting through Heathrow toward a British Airways 747. Somehow this involves several trips up and down escalators. My lungs are burning. I am suffocating under layers of wool and knitwear. I regret every late night in Stockholm, every cigarette, every drink. I get to my gate and see absolutely nobody there. My heart sinks. An attendant looks sadly at me. "They may not have closed the door yet. Give me a moment." I stare out at a beautiful spring day. A radio crackles. The attendant smiles. "Just made it. On you go!"
2300 GMT (6PM Eastern), Penn Station. Six hours of turbulence across the Atlantic. A glacial progress through Customs, and then a series of sprints through train stations to make it aboard an Acela bound for Boston. The ticket cost as much as the stories I was commissioned to write for this trip. I take off my coat and sweater and realize that I smell awful. My cotton T-shirt has the texture of a waterlogged chamois. I've been doing interval training all day under 20 pounds of wool. My seatmate looks at me. We briefly make eye contact. He blanches. I sit down and spend the next several hours trying not to raise my arms, as if that's going to accomplish anything. I am covered in travel miasma. The Acela lurches down the track. Usually it's three and a half hours to Boston. In the wake of the blizzard, it takes almost six. My companion is with me all the way to Route 128, the last stop before Boston. "Please let me out," he says, then adds, "I mean, this is my stop." He didn't mean that, but I appreciate the gesture more than he knows.
0400 GMT, (11 PM Eastern), Central Square, Cambridge. I text MK that I'm almost home. Then I drag my bags and suitcase up the salty brown steps of the Red Line T stop and find myself in a trench of snow. I am six and a half feet and I cannot see over the lip of it to the street. The sidewalk is barely wide enough for two people and there are entrances cut into the trench at each crosswalk. The city is preternaturally quiet even now. The T is shutting down soon, there are still crews out trying to clear snow. I walk home with my coat open to my T-shirt.
The air feels incredible. I am giddy. I am paying 2300 a month for 500 square feet with upstairs neighbors who keep pissing off the fire escape. The kitchen floor is pitched up by about 8 degrees. The back door is so far from flush with the sloping kitchen floor that we basically have a hole in our wall that no amount of weather-stripping can fix. Something is living in the walls, much larger than the mouse that we have stupidly adopted in lieu of having a dog because we can't afford any of the rentals that allow dogs. We are broke, we're losing our lease come the spring when the landlord decides to renovate. But I have never been so happy to be home and here in the icy white tunnels that have been carved out of the blizzard that stranded me in Iceland, I am struck by their near-magical beauty. I've never seen anything like it here, and I don't think I will again and a decade later this is going to be the thing I remember most clearly from this entire winter, that the most miserable three days of travel of my life…
…ended with a moment of perfect happiness and relief. In my memory, it started to snow on my walk back home, but maybe it just felt like it did, and I only imagine that I looked up and watched fat white flakes come drifting gently down against the darkness of the night sky.