Fuzzies: WKNDers’ Summer Travel Horror Stories

I’m used to Americans groping and shoving me at JFK airport, but this year I had hope on my flight to Miami. I was with one of my best friends and I felt like nothing could pull me down. Also, I was traveling with my $500+ electric guitar and I thought it was an absolute badass that no one should be talking about.

My friend, an old lady, and I sat in a row and everything was fine. My guitar was stowed in the overhead luggage compartment as directed by the flight attendant.

However, my peace was disturbed when Miamian Karen, sitting at 5’2″ – tried to place her hard case on my guitar. When I politely asked her what the hell she was doing, she replied that her seat was 10 rows back but had no upper cabinet space. She told me to move because the guitar was too big. When I refused, she started yelling at me in Spanish. The old woman next to me was shocked. My Colombian friend, who I went with, started yelling at her back.

There was a spot in the overhead bin in the front row that was just the right size for her luggage. When someone sitting next to us pointed this out, Karen from Miami said, “Look,” and nudged me to put my guitar in place very little. When I refused, the guitar started trying to move itself.

Unacceptable.

My line and I called the flight attendant and the attendant immediately closed the cabin my guitar was in and told her to move her luggage.

I hope she has a good flight.

– Edda Acker

I would do my best, I told myself. When I flew home from studying abroad in Nice, France, I discovered that the cheapest flight option was Europe and the continental United States on Hopscotch. “Home” was a four-day odyssey: six-hour trains, a night in an airport hotel, a transatlantic flight, another stay at an airport hotel, another flight to Minneapolis, a night with my uncle, and finally a trip to Rochester, Minnesota where I stayed with my grandmother, mother, extended family. And with my boyfriend, I had a long-awaited vacation after a stressful semester and spent three weeks in the rewarding but exhausting French hospital system.

My father booked my flight from New York to Minneapolis for fear that I would not have time to take the 9:40 JetBlue flight every day. “Annabel, I know how these airports work,” he told me – which he does, having been a long-time transatlantic commercial pilot himself. He even went so far as to check the arrival history for the Emirates flight I was on – “It’s been consistently delayed.

He emailed me my itinerary months in advance, and I had no trouble checking exactly where I was staying. He’s usually pretty good at these things, so intuitive that I didn’t think twice about how to get where I was going. But when I plugged the address into Uber, an hour-and-a-half-long driver showed up, followed by four times the fare I expected. My father booked me into a hotel at LaGuardia Airport, and I landed at John F. Kennedy Airport. Normally, I would have been able to handle this sort of thing, except that this is the moment my dad chose to let me know that my beloved dog – Tippy, a Lhasa Apso, had gotten me a first-grade friend – had gone to the vet in borderline kidney failure. After crying my eyes out the entire 90-minute drive, things got worse when I discovered that the hotel room overlooked a cemetery, not just any cemetery, but a vast plot of land where no less than 210,000 people were buried. God, I thought, am I going to get a tombstone for Tippy?

i don’t understand How do I get into these travel fiascos? -Although this is mild by my standards, it all works out in the end. My dog, being the stubborn creature that she is, crawled out, I moved to Minnesota and learned to double check everything – my dad, a professional hiker.

– Annabelle Moore

Unless you’re forced by oppressive airline weight limits to move the contents of your luggage from one suitcase to another on a raw, dry airport floor as two Air Canada employees gleefully watch, until you accidentally drop that one pair of underwear. You were supposed to drop it three years ago but somehow never did and now every traveler who passes you on the ground knows this about you. It was the bomb, you’ll never know shame until you’ve had it all.

– Hannah Mark

My trip to Greece was full of cancellations and delays and missed connections, leaving Nashville on a canceled flight the night before. The airline rebooked me fairly quickly for a vacation flight via DC, but as I was freezing at my empty gate in Dulles, they announced that my flight to Montreal had been delayed, meaning I would miss my direct connection to Athens.

Back then, I was tempted to just go back home – I was still in America. However, before Athens I went to Montreal on a flight to Frankfurt. Of course the flight was delayed. On top of that, a family of four had to be dumped on the pavement. Still, I thought I would make the next connection, but I didn’t. The six hours I lived in Germany were not a pleasant surprise. I had to re-enter security thinking I had explosives in my bag. I finally arrived at Athens airport twelve hours later than planned.

This was my first trip abroad, and I thought to myself, “At least my trip home can’t be any worse.” Worst of all – I was stuck in Germany for three days. Fun highlights: Embarrassing attempt to hail a taxi, brushing my teeth with hand soap, canceled a three-hour line. My last trip was at the Frankfurt airport (there are only four stamps on my passport), I saw each of my three bags and my body quietly left. In addition to the random secondary security check at the gate. I finally made it to Chicago, one flight away from home, another three-hour long customs line, with untied shoes and a five-minute run through O’Hare to board. I finally got home in mid-July, but my luggage was still lost in the ether.

Overall, my study abroad experience was extremely positive – including my Covid-19 diagnosis.

– Abigail Dixon