A Vacation With Many Firsts - Part 1

I am what you call a "Lucky" traveler. I never miss flights, I never have flights canceled on me, I never lose my baggage. My worse travel woe is excess baggage - the physical type; not emotional. This vacation, I experienced everything.

My friend (with whom I was traveling with) and I had the Oslo-Frankfurt-SmallCity connection. We missed our SmallCity connection. Up till now, I'm not sure how that happened. We were at the airport, at what I believe was the correct gate, but we missed the flight. It felt so strange to miss a flight. I always thought I was the emotional type because I am close to tears when my bag is overweight. I have no heart to throw stuff out of my suitcase. Strangely I was calm about missing the flight. We were happily given new boarding passes for next flight in 5 hours (maybe the flight was overbooked?) and a 10Euro meal voucher each for dinner (they were feeling bad for us?).

After waiting for approximately 4 hours (eating McDonald's for dinner and cashing in the dinner vouchers at Starbucks for enough cake slices for 6 people) we found out that our flight was canceled. So missing a flight and having a canceled flight all in the same day. We were told that there was a train going to SmallCity in exactly 20 minutes. Fight or flight? When you are told your flight is canceled (after you missed the same flight half a day ago), surely you feel like fighting - or just arguing enough to vent out some steam. At least, I thought that was the kind of person I was. I never give in when I am faced with bad service. Strangely (again), I found myself telling my friend to take the train connection and hurry out. Just before we rushed off from the airport, I heard myself asking "Bags?" and then we were given a phone number to call and ask for our bags to be sent to us. It was a 2 hour train and I spent the first 30 minutes in surprise at the day's events. Could it get worse? Fortunately, my friend, a native German speaker, was already on the phone - enquiring about a taxi from the airport where our train will arrive to SmallCity. We blew 60 Euros on the taxi and reached our destination at approximately 1.30am.