When I was younger, I traveled about once a month for my job in NYC. Travel at that time was a lot easier. It’s a whole different ballgame today—it’s the difference between ping pong and football—and you’re the ball.

We just got back from visiting our daughter who lives in Sweden. We made our reservations eons ago… long enough, in fact, that the airlines canceled multiple flights multiple times. Someone at the airlines must be psychic to know four months in advance that missing plane, crew or sufficient passengers would make the transatlantic flight inviable. The morning of our thrice-rescheduled flights, we arrived at the airport three hours in advance, with our printed out, confirmed flights scrunched firmly in fist, only to discover the airline computers thought we were returning home from Sweden that day, before we’d even left. So much for psychic omniscience. Our flight savior, who had to manually enter our information, handed us our manufactured boarding passes and casually warned us to check our return transatlantic flight because something seemed to have gone haywire. 

Haywire indeed. Our flight had evaporated. Without notice. We discovered our flight from Stockholm would land us in Munich, where, with no flight and no hotel reservations, we’d be forced to drink beer and sing German drinking songs, slumped over a table in Munich’s famous Hofbräuhaus… Ein, Zwei, G’Suffa!

Because my husband made reservations through a ticket consolidator, he spent half a day trying to ensure our return via something other than rowboat. Success! Our return flight cost only about $1000 more than the original round trip had cost. Hopefully the promises made by the travel insurance company do not also evaporate.

If you’ve flown recently, you know I could continue about going through customs, bags having to be rechecked to continue on with the same airline, and myriad delays, but I have only so much space here.

An additional word of advice: If you’ll be flying, arrange to be on the same rescheduled flight as my husband and me. We’ve cornered the market on TSA searches, so you probably won’t be bothered. He hit the jackpot this trip because on both legs of our transatlantic flights, he was stopped, wanded, and his bag and computer searched and tested for drugs and explosives. Who knew TSA has a “Suspect Senior” category for random searches?

You learn a lot about a person when you travel with them. Until this trip, I had no idea the TSA suspected my husband—because of what he stowed in his carry on—of being a mule for some overseas lord pushing antiquated 6-pound computers.