Travelling can be very stressful. You have to hurry, queue, sweat, deal with flight attendees that should have really chosen a different job (one without contact to humans) and sitting in tight airplane seats while dehydrating heavily due to the aircondition.
Thats the typical thing that you usually are prepared for when you are planning to travel. It gets even more interesting when unpredictable things such as the weather come into play. A storm, snow or a vulcano can destroy all plans you have and make you regret that you even left your home.
Today, I was in this exact situation. Quite some months ago, I booked a flight to Chicago. Since I will stay in the US for about 6 weeks, I needed to prepare a lot more than I usually do when travelling. I needed an international driver permit, ESTA, an US sim card and many more important but boring stuff. Finally, the day of departure came and I left my home, positively thinking and anxious about my long but interesting trip.
When I arrived at the Tegel Airport of Berlin with my first look on the timetable I learned that this day will most certainly proceed a bit different from what I expected it to proceed. Due to heavy snow fall a big part of connections was cancelled or heavily delayed. Mine was still displayed as “running on time” but since all the other flights to Dusseldorf (that was the place where I was supposed to get my connection flight) were either delayed or cancelled, I had no reason to hope for the best.
In the end my flight was about 2 hours delayed and I missed my connection flight too. This situation forced me to queue for another 2,5 hours in Dusseldorf at the Lufthansa Ticket Desk to get a new connection. I took this all quite relaxed, given that I knew that I am not able to change the situation either plus I knew that I will have a pretty long stay in the US so one day more or less do not matter that much.
Finally, when I finally had waited my way to the ticket desk, the service operator gave me a flight to Stockholm, where I would stay overnight and then continue to Chicago the next day. The hotel in Stockholm was amazing, I even got dinner and breakfast and had a fantastic room directly at the airport where I am writing this post from at the moment.
My message is: If plans change, that must not always be something bad. In my case I know that I will arrive a lot more relaxed, since my way to the airport is reduced to basically a few minutes and I dont need to take another feeder flight, which reduces the waiting time drastically. Also, since I usually dont stay at Hotels I am really enjoying the time here.
So, be positive and understand the whole journey as a part of your experience. You will see, that helps a lot!
Yours
Crazy Ivory