We were five minutes away from loading our bags into my car and making the trek to RDU for our flight when my wife’s cellphone dinged, alerting her to a new text message.
“Oh, no,” she said, looking at her phone. “Oh no, no, no!”
I braced for what I somehow instinctively knew was coming — a flight delay — and hoped, prayed, that it wouldn’t totally shred our travel plans.
No such luck.
What was supposed to be an early-evening flight from RDU to Dulles a week ago Friday to connect us to an overnight flight to Munich — all part of an eight-person family trip to Germany and Austria a year in the planning — would now depart three hours late. It meant that only our son Addison and his wife Charis, flying from their home in Orlando, would make the connection in Dulles; they’d arrive in Munich on time, at noon the following day.
The rest of us?
After almost an hour on the phone — Lee Ann with the airline, and me with our travel agent — we settled on our best alternative: a Charlotte-to-Munich flight a day later. It put the rest of us in Germany a full 21 hours behind the other two — causing a lost “family day,” a free day we’d eagerly anticipated spending together on Saturday before the four-city, 26-person group tour of which we were a part of began officially on Sunday.
Missing an overseas connection, and that day together, was, of course, a disappointment. I’ve lived long enough to know that life deals you a lot of curveballs and some occasionally really crappy cards, and that you should expect them, even anticipate them. But as our packed bags sat near the door and we settled in for an unexpected night at home instead of crossing the Atlantic, I struggled to process my disappointment. One of the things I had for some odd reason feared the most — missing a flight, costing all of us (my wife, our children, their spouses and my wife’s mother) a day together in a city we’d never visited before — had happened, and coming at the 11th hour, after months of anticipation, stung me particularly hard.
It turns out that a “tire repair” — that’s how United Airlines described it in a follow-up message — caused the delay. As I stewed about it over the next few hours, it occurred to me that the travel agent we’d used to book these flights (we usually make our own flight reservations) was the same one my wife and I used for our 25th anniversary trip four years ago — another European adventure that began with an RDU-to-JFK flight that got canceled because of, naturally, a mechanical problem with the airplane.
I called that fact — using this agent only twice in our lives, and both times having the very first leg of the trip not happen — to Lee Ann’s attention. “Well,” I announced to her in frustration, “we’ll never use her again. She’s bad luck.”
And then I pondered what I’d said: what exactly was the causal relationship between this particular travel agent and two airplanes exactly four years apart having mechanical issues that caused us to miss an overseas flight? Fate? Coincidence?
Was she really bad luck? Or did luck even enter into the equation?
I think it did, but I finally concluded our luck — if that’s the word for it — was good. (And, of course, our travel agent had nothing to do with it.)
On our anniversary trip in 2015, we ended up getting re-booked on a different airline and ultimately left RDU some eight hours late — but in doing so a very kind gate agent for British Airways upgraded us to first class. That wasn’t turning-lemons-to-lemonade, but rather a lemons-to-caviar “are you kidding me?” experience, and the start of what was a most memorable anniversary trip.
And on our vacation last week, we indeed arrived nearly a day later than scheduled. But once our revised plans were in place, we started counting the positives: our delay was spent at home, not in an airport overnight; we got to take care of some things around the house before leaving; and daughter Karis — exhausted from a tough week of work as a counselor at Camp Royall in Pittsboro — could spend a much-needed night in her own bed.
And our Florida son and his wife of two years, who in the last few months have endured the stress of a job change and a move into their first house, got a much-needed day of relaxation and togetherness before the rest of us arrived.
Our fortune was decidedly good, not bad.
We had plenty more of it on the trip, including safe travels all around and incredible sunny weather despite a forecast that called for rain on six of our eight days abroad. The only rain we saw, a much-needed cooling squall on our last full day, made Vienna, the final stop on our trip, even more beautiful.
And best of all, we were together.
Lucky? Nah. Even better. We were blessed.