Beyond Selidor

I was about to ask if your mother is cursed 😂

we don't have a ton of travel mishaps in my family history, though the time my mum, her then husband (well, they were in the middle of a divorce) and two of my sisters were in Iceland for a few weeks that summer and missed a flight will stay golden in my memory forever. mum's family is from the east and so they meant to fly home with first a domestic flight from Egilsstaðir to Reykjavík and then an international flight from Keflavík to Copenhagen. mum had somehow got the time of their domestic flight wrong so they arrived at the airport like...half an hour after the plane took off. the other flight was in 12 hours so they were like, well, if we drive, we can...maybe...make it? (the drive is 14 hours.)

they did not make it.

what I remember is that mum called me, explained how they'd missed the flight, at which point I cracked up laughing because how do you fuck up that badly, and asked me to look up a particular cousin on facebook for her phone number because mum didn't have internet service on the road and couldn't contact her herself. this was because they'd realised they weren't going to make the second flight and would need a place to crash in Reykjavík. they wound up paying an astronomical sum for new flights home.


my own travel mishap story is ten years old this month! in April 2014 I went to the UK for about ten days of holidaying. I can't remember which day I went, but I was flying back on Thursday April 17 on an early morning flight from Gatwick - like 7am early, I got up SO early to get the train from Victoria because I was still young and spry enough that early mornings for cheap flights didn't faze me. only, when I tried to check in at the airport through the machine, it wouldn't let me...so I go to the counter and present my booking and ask for help and the guy behind the counter takes one look at the piece of paper I'd printed out with my booking details on it, snorts, and says 'your return flight is in July.' jaw dropping etc I take the paper back to look at it, and yes, it does indeed say July...17th...which is also a Thursday. I had the dawning realisation that when I booked the flights and was clicking back and forth between dates in the price calendar to find the best options, the calendar must at one point have flipped to July for the return flight and I didn't notice because both dates were Thursday 17th.

needless to say i never made that mistake again.

guy at the counter tells me to book a new ticket and points in the general direction of travel bureau counters just a few metres away, so I go to the first one and say 'well, I fucked up my booking and I need a ticket to Copenhagen, today, what do you have?'
'flight from Heathrow in two hours for 400 pounds'
'...we are literally in Gatwick right now. what else?'
'flight from here at 13:15 for for 250 pounds?'
'yes fine i'll take it'.

(note at the time i was a broke student and that 250 pounds cleared out my account and put my account in minus. my account did have a credit of the equivalent of about 500 pounds, what that means is that i didn't go into overdraft (for which the interest rate was about 27%) but credit (with a more reasonable interest rate of 6%) so long as i didn't owe more than 500 pounds. still not great though)

i get my ticket and go wait and then check in as soon as i can and wait more and get lunch and wait more and go to the gate, whereupon the check-in person takes my ticket, frowns at her screen, then calls her colleague over, who also frowns at both the ticket and the screen, and says 'there's no record of there ever having been a seat there'. which is not a reassuring sentence to hear as you're about to board a flight, ever.

on the inside i'm going, oh, here we go again. wonder what delights i'm about to experience this time? remembering the time three years earlier i meant to travel to edinburgh for a long weekend and never made it onto the plane because after an hour delay at the airport a person in a yellow high vis coverall came through the doors, looked at the check-in staff and just shrugged sheepishly. flight was cancelled and i opted to cancel the entire trip and get my money back instead of rebooking because i'd had a bad feeling about it since i booked the flight in the first place. truly, i was prepared for anything. ghost seats? wings falling off the plane? elephants trampling the airport?

they spend some time at the computer and eventually it transpires that the plane is overbooked. 'if you're lucky somebody else doesn't show up and then you can get that seat. do you have checked luggage?' i did have checked luggage. they are very apologetic and ask me to wait in this here seat, and they'll try to get me on the flight. passengers board. i joke with the staff in between waves of people boarding. eventually nobody is left to board and it's just me and the two check-in people so we continue to chat and joke and they're all cheerful, oh, maybe it's your lucky day, there's one person hasn't shown up yet, and on the inside i'm like, hm. i'll believe it when i see it. gate closing time is approaching. i'm having fun actually, i'm in 'whatever happens will happen' mode. i don't care. the staff is great. it's a beautiful day. i have work the following day but i am 1000% relaxed.

at the very last minute a guy in a grey business suit and black briefcase comes running and the first check-in person i spoke to gives me this 'oh no i'm so sorry look' and i just start laughing, because i was expecting this. they make some calls and a luggage handler comes up to the gate because they need to know what my suitcase looks like to take it off the plane because they can't fly with unaccompanied luggage.
'what does your suitcase look like'
'it's black -'
'AHAHAHA of course' (note he was not mad, just amused)
'i wasn't finished!' (i whine) 'i know what i'm doing! it's black, about this size, the top handle has a wide red satin ribbon tied to it though the bow's probably come undone it always does, and the zippers have bright yellow cords tied to them in knots so there's a knotty string this long on each zipper'
'all right ma'am! you do know what you're doing!' (look of respect) 'i'll go right ahead and grab that off the plane for you'
yes, i was smug.

the check-in person was very apologetic (she and the other person genuinely looked worried that I'd be angry/start yelling/whatever and that alone was enough to make me vow that I would never lose my cool at staff for just doing their jobs, jesus) and rebooked me (free of charge) on their next flight and gave me all the upgrades she possibly could (for free) as well as detailed instructions on how to claim compensation because the next flight was some 4-5 hours later so it was definitely past the cut-off time for compensation (250EUR, which covered a substantial portion of the ticket I'd had to purchase that morning). i actually had a great time chatting to those three people for the time it took to sort me out, jokes and all, and i had the sense that not only were they relieved i hadn't turned out a bitch customer but also genuinely happy (me, on the inside, i'm so sorry people treat you like shit! may you have a lovely rest of the month!), and for my part i was still in the 'wonder what will happen next' mode just, like, i will get home one way or another, let's find out how! genuinely would not have been surprised if it'd been on the back of a tortoise racing across the English channel, or whatever.

i wasn't allowed to leave the secure area by myself so had to be escorted out and to where i could pick up my suitcase (not luggage claims) because i would have to check in again, which i could only do on the other side of security, and then go through security again.

there was so much waiting. i read an entire novel in between all of this, in various places in the airport. red seas skies whatever it was called by scott lynch. secondhand paperback. hated the ending.

after i went through security for the second time i bought a bottle of bailey's chocolate deluxe liquor because i'd just had some for the first time a few days earlier and really liked it, and i thought, despite the fact i couldn't really afford it, that i really deserved a nice thing after all of that, even if it had been entirely my own fault. funny thing was i wanted to buy it earlier but decided against it because i'd had a bad feeling, turns out that was a good thing i didn't because i wouldn't have been able to get it through security the second time even in one of those sealed bags they give you when you have connecting flights (i asked, the second time, because i was curious, and they said no) and i was broke enough it would've really upset me to lose not just the 18 quid or so i paid for it, but also the thing itself.

got home without a hitch after that. there weren't even delays at luggage claims in Copenhagen airport iirc.

i think i spent about 12 hours in Gatwick that day. (there are worse airports to spend 12 hours in. Gatwick was small, but not crowded, and i was able to both feed myself without compromising my allergies and find seats to wait in.) i was very tired when i made it home. i got my 250EUR compensation promptly and on the weekend i made homemade ice cream with regular baileys and i poured the chocolate deluxe on top like a sauce and i devoured it. the bottle lasted me all summer. delicious on ice cream.