Traveller’s Tales – Making the best of a bad situation
Travelling isn’t always perfect. It isn’t always luxurious, and plans don’t always go off flawlessly. If there is one thing that I’ve learned through my travels, it’s that you are in charge of only how you react to situations, but have almost no say in the situations themselves.
To say that unfortunate things happen when you are travelling is an understatement. This past Christmas, I was stuck in the Chicago airport thanks to an unfortunate weather advisory and a broken plane. I was happily heading home from Miami on Christmas Eve, excited to reconnect with my fiancé after a week apart, eager to share all the stories of my cruise ship adventures. We were two hours or so out from Fort Lauderdale when an announcement was made that our autopilot was broken and because of bad weather in Chicago, we wouldn’t be able to land there without it. We’d have to turn back, land in Orlando and wait for a new plane. It was at this point that I did the math. With an hour flight to get back to Orlando, time to land and get a new plane, I knew I wouldn’t be making my connecting flight in Chicago.
When I landed in Orlando, I was calling home, searching flights, trying to figure out any way I could get home that evening, but I came up short. That is when the panic set in. There were no more flights out of Chicago that evening and it looked like the rest of them would have multiple layovers or would get in after nine in the evening on Christmas day.
Here’s the thing about flying – there is only so much an airline is willing to do. Some airlines are better than others and some airlines drive you to send sixteen angry emails regarding the way they handle these sorts of situations. But I digress. The point is, that at some point you must decide what is most important to you. Do you spend more of your precious earned money to connect elsewhere? I thought of booking a flight home to Toronto to spend Christmas with my parents or simply flying back to Miami to lie on the beach. I was spiralling into a panic that was going to ruin not only my Christmas, but the memory of my holiday.