Prior to heading out to Europe, I talked to Dad about my itinerary and the things I planned to see. I also mentioned the tight turnaround between my trip, our week at the beach, and the start of the next school year. Dad lamented the loss of a potential quick trip to get in another baseball stadium in our quest to visit all 30. As soon as he said that, I consulted my calendar and realized that we could still squeeze it in.
With that, we started planning. I booked our tickets for Thursday morning. (I would get to sleep in my own bed for a few hours at least.) Dad took care of the lodging and the Phillies tickets. If everything went according to plan, we could pull it off. Murphy’s Law dictates that any time one says something like that, a wrench gets thrown in the plan.
I had a full day of travel back from Europe. It started with an early morning departure from my flat. I bid a reluctant but fond farewell around six that morning. I had prepped everything the evening before so all I had to do that morning was slip my big bag on my back and my cross body bag across my front after eating the breakfast I had prepared.
Once in the metro I paid for my ticket, double the normal fare within the city because I selected the airport as my final destination. While typical of all major cities I have traveled in, I still do not understand this fare increase. Once on my way, I had some wry flashbacks to a few days before when I got mildly lost in one of the stations on the way to my train to Seville. Thankfully, I had no smooth maneuvers on this leg of the trip.
My first flight lasted barely any time at all since I made my first stop back in the Lisbon airport. (No, I did not count Portugal as one of my twelve countries visited on this trip.) I felt much more alert and rested this time. I needed another meal, something akin to brunch since I had started to force myself to pre-adjust to the Eastern time zone. I wandered around for a while before settling in to wait until they posted the gate number.
Everything about my layover in Lisbon, the flight over the Atlantic, and my layover in Newark went as well as any traveler could hope. I had a moment of apprehension as I went through customs. I got to skip the line thanks to my recently acquired Global Entry but still had to declare that I had some sort of food item, the cheese. When I packed, I had opened the bag to make sure that I still had the receipt, something the worker in the Amsterdam cheese shop had stated would allow me to bring the cheese into the US. I still had that receipt, sort of. The oils from the cheese had erased all evidence of words and numbers on the page. Once I got to the point where I had to give an agent the paper that listed my declaration, I had nothing to worry about. He checked it off and sent me on my way without a word.
About an hour before the flight I headed to terminal A, the terminal from which the smaller flights departed. I glanced at the board to find the gate number and saw a word I have never before seen next to one of my flights, cancelled. Say what? Instead of going to the gate or even going to the terminal, I walked up to the ticket counter to find out what happened.
After waiting in line for quite some time, past when my original flight would have started boarding, I tried searching for an answer online but could find no weather issues or any other issues that seemed cancellation worthy. I felt pretty relaxed as I stood there and waited. Getting stressed would not get me home any sooner or make the line move any faster. A lady a couple places behind me did not share that calm and got quite anxious, so much so that I just wanted her to go away because her anxiety started to overwhelm my calm.
When I got up to one of the attendants, I discovered two things. One, flights using small planes got cancelled because of weather. Okay, good to know. Two, there were absolutely no flights available to Greenville or any nearby airports that night. They couldn’t send me to Philadelphia either, too short of a distance from Newark. They tried to get me on another flight leaving almost immediately and even though they tried their absolute best, the people on the other end would not budge. They did put me on a flight to Atlanta that left so soon I needed to run to get to the gate only to discover that they had delayed that flight for a few hours which would get me to Atlanta after midnight with a three hour drive home after that. After weighing my options, I ended up booking a hotel with free hotel transport from the Newark airport to the hotel and a ticket on the Amtrak train to Philadelphia in the morning to meet Dad at the airport instead of the unpleasant alternative.
After quite an ordeal, I finally made it to the hotel and to the bed for some sleep. More travel awaited in the morning but so did meeting up with a member of my family for the first time in nearly a month to share some baseball and history.