I was on vacation a few weeks ago. For the first time ever, I traveled across the Atlantic.  I don’t like to fly in airplanes so I wasn’t looking forward to the actual ‘travel’ part of the trip. It just doesn’t make sense to me that a thing that big can go that high in the sky and stay up there for hours at a time. I try not to think about it but sometimes, thinking about the mechanics of flight is easier than reaching your destination in time to enjoy your vacation.

I spent months planning my trip abroad.  Abroad-it’s a funny word. In fact, according to Urban Dictionary, I’m spelling it wrong. It’s supposed to be, ‘a broad’. I always thought ‘a broad’ was slang for ‘a woman,’ but I must be wrong.  Urban Dictionary says, and I quote, a broad “…mean [sic] like a foreign country, foreign parts” or “if somebody doesn t [sic] live in your county [sic]. He live in [sic] a broad.” Apparently, I went ‘a broad’.

I checked-in for my flight the evening before my scheduled departure. I picked my seat-because I like that taken care of ahead of time, signed up for text alerts about the flight, and printed my boarding pass.  Everything was in order for my late afternoon flight the next day-until about noon the next day. I started getting text messages from the airline about delays for the first leg of my flight. ‘Leg of a flight’-that’s funny too, but it just means first flight of a trip consisting of multiple flights.  Yeah, I know-that’s enough with the vocabulary lessons-I’ll move on.

The first text message told me my fight would leave 20 minutes later than scheduled. The second said 40 minutes later, and the third nonchalantly let me know that I was not going to make my connecting flight out of the country.  I called the airline and after waiting on hold for 20 minutes I learned that my connecting flight was the last one going a broad that day.  “But I have a double decker hop-on-hop-off bus tour, a visit to a brewery and a distillery, and a bar crawl scheduled for the first leg of my multiple day vacation a broad,” I thought.  “I’ll miss all that without a flight out today.”  The only options were to depart from another airport an hour away and to begin leg two of the trip at a different airport.  I had to re-check-in, re-pick my seat-because I like that taken care of ahead of time, and re-print my boarding pass. Luckily, I was a little butthole re-tentive when packing so all I had to do was close the suitcase, get in the car, and drive to the airport. I made it a broad and in time to tour, visit, and crawl. And at the end of the day, I didn’t have to think about a thing.