 |
 |
|
|
HOME
|
A Trip from Hell by Greg Dobbs When it comes to suffering through a trip from hell, it’s one thing when it’s a business trip; you have no right to expect to have a good time anyway, and at least you’re getting paid to fly through the flames. But it’s another thing when it’s a vacation trip from hell. Does it really ruin the whole hapless vacation, as we sometimes avow? No, not really, but it sure can bring it to a premature and painful end. I mean, you know it’s a bad day when every bite you take is on an airplane or in an airport coffee shop! Ready to reach for a Kleenex? Anyhow, the fact is that if you’ve done any traveling yourself, anywhere at all, you’ve probably endured your own trip from hell ... which means the only difference between you and me is that I get to complain about it publicly, while you only get to confirm that these things don’t just happen to you. Misery, I believe, really does love company. And if you don’t get to travel much, at least you can mellow any envy with the smug certitude that you have been dead right to stay home! Now,
to the trip! Not long ago, I went with my family to Grand
Cayman, just south of Cuba. Going was no problem. Coming home
was! I’ve gotten back to Colorado faster from Europe, from South
America, even from Saudi Arabia (which is about a thousand years away)
than I did from an island just a few hundred miles from American
shores. A trip scheduled for about 7 hours took almost three times
that long.
I took it like the experienced traveler I am. After all, I’ve raced overnight across the English Channel to escape France during an airline strike, bribed officials to board the only plane out of Anchorage when all the rest were grounded by a volcano, and once, I’ll now confess, some colleagues and I (on a Mission from God) pilfered boarding passes and displaced legitimate passengers to get on a sold-out plane leaving Ethiopia. So would a long line at an airline counter in a civilized British Protectorate unnerve me? Not on your life... not until the "final boarding call" was made, and we hadn’t even reached the hundred-man-maze near the front of the line! In fact, we were still worming our way to the ticket counter when our vanished plane had long since landed in Miami! True, the errant airline rebooked us to get off the island a mere four hours later, but one missed flight is like a set of dominoes; connections fall away, and your leisurely vacation becomes the trip from hell. Of course when they rebooked us, I wasn’t fooled for a minute! Some poor shnook -- more than one -- had to be bumped off the plane we were put on, then someone else was bounced from an even later flight off the island. That’s what they get for traveling! Lessons learned?
But then, we’d be complaining about something else. Like, "I never get to go anywhere." Don’t look for me to grab the Kleenex!
|
It all started with an
overbooked flight. A badly overbooked flight! We should
have known when we pulled up to the airport an hour-and-a-half ahead of
flight time -- isn’t that more than they recommend?? -- and
the line already ahead of us could have filled three airplanes like ours.