Cursed.
Try as I might, that’s the word that’s repeating in my brain as I head off to Europe this year. It’s my fourth solo trip. I’m a seasoned traveler by now, so the apprehension I feel seems odd and misplaced. First there was London in the summer of 2006, then a wider swing through the UK in 2007 ending with a week in Paris, and then last year Italy. Fourteen days spent living la dolce vita in sweet, lovely Italy. This time it’s a return trip to France to explore parts of Normandy and the Alsace, followed by a journey north and east into Belgium and the Netherlands. It all sounds wonderful on paper—perfect, really—so it’s a shame that the entire enterprise is doomed from the start.
I’m not entirely serious when I say that, of course, but there is something to it. Unwittingly, the dates I locked in last fall in order to use my frequent flyer points conflict with my nephew’s high school graduation. That’s guilt-inducing enough, but to make matters worse I’ve developed a lingering foot problem that makes walking distances rather like stepping on a nail (over and over), which should make climbing into German bunkers near Omaha Beach and, quite frankly, all of Mont-St-Michel, interesting.
Weeks before I leave, an outbreak of swine flu has me worried about restrictions on international travel. In a mad and quite possibly vain attempt to stay well, I start carrying a bottle of Purell with me everywhere I go. Then, with just days to go, I find out that United Mobile, the company that operates the SIM card on my cell phone, is suddenly out of business and has taken with it all of the money I recently added to my pre-paid account in preparation for my trip. And finally, hours before takeoff, comes the surprising news that my “window” seat on Lufthansa, booked seven months ago, is actually—and ironically—in a row without a window. When I make a mental tally of these things, I know it could be far worse. In this economy, I’m fortunate to be able to travel at all, and yet it feels like a premonition of things to come. There are storm clouds on the horizon. Literally.
So let’s just cut to the chase. Let’s get to the bottom line. I’m writing this as a retrospective at home in Vermont in mid-winter, so I might as well say that this is going to be the story of a road trip that is filled with rain, transportation detours and delays, more rain, scaffolding and other forms of obstruction, a broken camera lens, and still more rain. Really, a ridiculous amount of rain. So, let’s just thank God here and now for Parisian tartes and café cremes, Belgian chocolate, and Dutch pancakes, before rewinding to the start of the story…
Amen.
It’s early on a Sunday night and I’m at the Philadelphia International Airport waiting to board a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. This is what happens when you try to use years of accumulated points in your Dividend Miles account. You get a tight connecting flight on a partner airline, although I suppose the upside—if I follow the Sarah Palin school of thought on foreign travel—is that I now get to include Germany on the list of countries that I’ve visited!
There is a general moan among the passengers on flight 427 when a short delay is announced for “cleaning and catering.” Within minutes the crowd grows antsy and it is clear that there will be little patience for boarding etiquette. Despite the usual invitation for families with small children to board first, everyone begins to press towards the door in an undifferentiated mass. The Lufthansa employees seem to know it’s a losing battle, so they resort to social admonishment instead. In a stern German accent, a man says: “I dit not know vee had so many children onboard dis flight!”
Filing in, though, I’m feeling a bit smug. We are told that the cabin is filled to capacity, every seat taken, but before leaving home I checked in online and was able to change my undesirable, windowless seat from 32K to 35A, a maneuver at the time that felt worthy of a fist pump. But as I make my way down the aisle, I’m suddenly perplexed. Row 32 has a window, a perfectly fine window, identical in every way to every other window. So much for the color-coded warning on Seat Guru’s floor plan.
As I settle into my new assignment, I find myself squeezed in next to a very large and already very sweaty woman. She’s quiet and not at all inconsiderate, but between shoulder and knee, there’s truly no way to avoid full bodily contact. It’s going to be a long and uncomfortable night. I crane my neck to the right and for a moment stare wistfully at the nice-looking man sitting in the aisle seat of row 32, and the woman resting peacefully by the window next to him. Ah, fate, what have you done to me?
On the upside, we were scheduled to depart at 6:05 PM, and despite the all the nonsense over “cleaning and catering” it’s only 6:15 when we pull away from the gate, which when you think about it, isn’t bad at all. But the delay has forced us far back in the queue for take-off. It’s 7:00 by the time we lift into the air. My one and a half hours of leeway in Frankfurt—an overly optimistic layover from the start—is shrinking into nothing…
The Independent Traveler 