This Episode of Misadventures in Travel is Brought to You By

… Hurricane Isaac, and by the Lufthansa strike.

I will get to Frankfurt sooner or later. It’s just going to be later instead of sooner. (**NOTE** Since writing this post, I have, in fact, arrived in Frankfurt intact AND complete with baggage-- it's a Christmas miracle!) 

As I write this, I’m sitting at Chicago/O’Hare airport gate B17, watching a crew of decidedly not striking Lufthansa employees funnel passengers onto a flight to Frankfurt that I could have been on, had I not been absolutely convinced that the flight was cancelled because of the strike. Instead, I get to wait three more hours—in addition to the two extra hours I already waited in Cincinnati, for the 6:30 PM flight that the very kind and patient United desk agent found for me after the plane that was supposed to get me to O’Hare in time for the 2:30 United flight to Frankfurt went kaputt. And after I insisted (in my defense, having checked the Lufthansa site) that the Lufthansa flight at 3:40 didn’t exist.

It’s all good, though. I’ll just hang out States-side for a few more hours, reading the copy of Bossypants that I picked up back in Cincinnati and enjoying my first quality German eavesdropping/people-watching opportunity—a group of four, all wearing very stylish eye glasses and speaking what sounds to me to be astonishingly correct German. The oldest of the group, a woman with short grey hair, is carrying a newly-purchased, still-in-the-box backyard backgammon set onto the plane. I find the idea of this quartet engaging in some ferocious backyard backgammon somewhere in Germany to be incredibly entertaining.

Anyway, back to my misfortunes. Due to a bout of inclement weather between Cincinnati and Chicago that I can only attribute to the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac, the radar on the plane that was supposed to take off from CVG at 12:20 was KIA—drowned or short-circuited or whatever goes wrong with the fancy navigation equipment in the nose of planes (Encouragingly for those a little nervous about flying, the plane did not nosedive in a fiery inferno of doom as soon as its equipment went haywire on the way to Cincinnati). A jovial fellow-traveler, who from all appearances is a real-life version of George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air, offered the pilot his Garmin, but no dice: we were all going to have to find new flights to wherever it was we were going. Grumble grumble. This is unacceptable. How dare the pilot not be willing to fly back into storm weather basically blind, endangering all of our lives but, gosh darn it, getting us to O’Hare (almost) on time?

I’ve always thought that I’m a pretty good traveler. As it turns out, I’m a pretty good traveler

—as long as everything runs smoothly. The minute something goes wrong, I become anxious, twitchy, prone to bouts of pacing, profanity, and, worst of all, tears. Fortunately, in this particular instance I gave a very good impression of a helpless, bewildered young girl on the verge of an enormous undertaking, and people treated me accordingly: fellow passengers smiled sympathetically, desk attendants offered to escort me to the gate where my new flight to O’Hare would be boarding, the stranded pilot called me “sweetheart.” I hate crying in front of strangers (I won’t pretend I’ve always felt this way; it’s actually a fairly new development), but the truth is it’s not a bad way to get help in the airport. As long as you crack jokes through your tears, don’t curse out the attendants trying to help you, and don’t snot or blotch too noticeably.

One interaction with a particularly sympathetic fellow-traveler I found less enjoyable than others, and less helpful than most. It was with a woman, thirty-five-trying-to-look-twenty-five, with a tumble of dirty-blonde curls and wearing a cross choker around her neck.  I’m at the height of my panic mode, still a good five or six people away from the gate desk. Having completed her own alternative arrangements, the woman comes up to me, rubs my arm sympathetically (anyone who knows me knows that I have a pretty aggressive aversion to unsolicited physical contact), and reminds me that I have my health, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t know if this makes me unusual, but I don’t find the idea that some higher power wanted me to miss my flight all that comforting—particularly in the moment. I also don’t want to hear that the experience will make me stronger, or that one day I will look back on this and laugh. But I do my best nod-and-smile, thank the woman for her kind words, and agree with her—this is happening for a reason. As she floats away on her cloud, I add to myself, “Because there’s crappy weather between here and O’Hare.”

Anyway, before I know it, I have an alternate connection to Chicago and a brand new Frankfurt flight. And suddenly I’m a good traveler again.

Apart from all of the flight-change hullaballoo, my feelings about the big departure have been oddly muted. I tried to run a diagnostic on my thoughts when I first arrived at my gate, having hugged my parents away at the safety checkpoint and thus begun my great adventure in earnest. But my brain was—and is, still—strangely quiet. I can’t tell if that’s because there’s nothing going on, or because so much is going on that it’s all sort of cancelling out. There’s such a meditative quality to airports, such a sense of suspended motion, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the former.

It’s counterintuitive to say that, I know, given that airports are all about motion, and the amount of hustle and bustle that comes with the territory, and especially in light of the chaos that I’ve just had to wrangle. But when you’re sitting at your gate, or on your plane, and the hustle and bustle are over and there’s nothing to do but wait— wait to board, wait to take off, wait to land, wait to debark—all the motion falls by the wayside. You might even forget that you’re going anywhere at all. This is why I prefer window seats on planes to aisle seats: I like being able to look out and see the earth passing by beneath me, as proof that I’m not just hanging suspended in space.

Do you remember that old gag, mostly from cartoons, where it looks like the character is running past all of this scenery, but then the camera pulls back and you see he’s actually running on a treadmill, and the scenery going past is just a painting on a conveyor belt, looping over and over and over? The gag is played for laughs, but as a kid I always felt sort of bad for the poor guy. But then again, it’s an old puzzle: how do you prove that you’re the one in motion, and not the ground below your feet?