The [ahem] Joys of Travel

Fear and grumbling en route to Oxford

Looks peaceful, doesn't it? Don't be fooled. Photos mine.

Cari amici,

I’m traveling in England for a few weeks, a trip I’ve longed for since my teenage years. For one reason or another—“small” obstacles such as children, divorce, lack of disposable income, and so on—England eluded me for, like, 50 years. But this year, finally, it was going to happen; I’d rendezvous with two college friends in Oxford and we’d go on together to Bath and Cornwall and London.

Or maybe not.

One of my friends had a health scare, and surgery followed, putting our plans on hold until early February when my friend was cleared to travel. Then a string of health issues beset me and my dog, and I felt like Britain was never going to be in my personal cards. Things came together at the last minute, and after a flight delay I was on my way. It was when we began our descent to Stansted that I began to think I should have stayed home.

Turbulence had tossed the plane around like a balsa wood toy for most of the flight, and winds were gusting hard when it was time to land. Our descent was . . . how can I put it? Careening? Nauseating? Terrifying? All of the above? As the plane skidded and fell, its wings dipped crazily, and I wondered how our pilot could possibly land safely.

It turned out we couldn’t. Some 500 feet from the ground (so says my plane geek son, who looked up the flight data), we leveled off and started to climb. Moments later a flight attendant announced oh-so-casually that the pilot, as we had surely noticed, had  “decided not to land,” as if his choice was based on whim, not the desire to live a little longer.

After making a large circle, we headed in again. I’d hoped for a different runway, a different angle into the wind, but no, it was the same one, approached with a longer, more gradual trajectory. In the cabin, all was anxiety and fear: silenced screens, white-knuckled grips on seat backs, conversations cut short. We sat, staring out windows or straight ahead, willing the plane to defy nature and praying the pilot was a Top Gun grad.

Well, you know how it turned out. Once our adrenaline had crested and ebbed, did we applaud the rocky landing? You bet. And we took the flight attendants seriously when they warned parents to hold onto their children when exiting via portable stairs. The stairs bucked violently, shaking and shuddering against their restraints, and it didn’t take much imagination to envision little lightweight beings going airborne. Welcome to England. After decades of waiting for this moment, I didn’t care which country I’d landed in; terra firma was all that mattered.

Next up: transit to Oxford, where my friends, traveling from America, were waiting for me. Fortunately I could buy a ticket straight through. A kind man at the Stansted Express counter gave me an itinerary along with my ticket—Stansted Express to Tottenham Hale, the tube to the Marlybone station (it should have been Paddington, but a bridge on the rail line was out, natch, forcing a deviation), then Chiltern Railways to Oxford. Va bene.

I caught the Express with two minutes to spare. The train was new, clean, and spacious, with digital readouts announcing the stops. I gave London area transit an A+—until I got to the Underground station, where I discovered that the train I was told to take didn’t actually go to Marylebone. The kind man hadn’t mentioned a transfer, but obviously one was needed. Problem was, there were no system maps, no signage of any kind indicating which trains did go to Marylebone, and no cell service there in the bowels of the Underground, which meant my trusty transit app, Moovit, didn’t work.

After waylaying a friendly-looking woman who told me to transfer at Oxford Circle, I boarded a packed, hot, stuffy, deafeningly noisy train with no digital readouts. Blaring announcements were impossible to hear much less understand, and the only system map near me was microscopic and half hidden behind a seated woman. I was not amused.

I was even less amused when I discovered that transferring at Oxford Circle meant dragging my suitcase up and down flights of stairs—not what the doctor had ordered for my tendinitis. I saw ibuprofen, and lots of it, in my near future. The London area’s transit grade plummeted to a D.

At Marylebone, the Chiltern timetable announced a train to Oxford at 7:50, not 7:18 like the kind man had told me. Or so I thought. Off I went to buy food, having stupidly not eaten lunch. No sooner had I sat down to eat than a disembodied voice announced—guess what!—the 7:18 train, departing in four minutes. Racing to the platform, pushing though a horde of exiting passengers at the ticket kiosk, I was sure I was doomed. (Hellooooo, London transit folks, ever heard of separate kiosks for arrivals and departures? Saves on hostility and lowers the risk of bodily harm.)

I made the train with 30 seconds to spare. This one too was packed, with only skimpy overhead shelves suitable for small carry-ons. The coach had an odd design, with two seats on either side near the entrances/exits for a couple of rows, then three seats on one side and two on the other so that the off-center aisle narrowed to a barely passable slot. I perched on the edge of the only available seat, next to a manspreading guy whom I chose not to look in the eye, and wondered how much damage my greasy fast-food dinner was doing to the contents of my backpack.

Debarking at Oxford Parkway, I looked for the bus my friends had told me to take. (No taxi would make the less-than-a-mile jaunt.) The station must have hired the guy who did the Underground signage, because there was none, and the man at the desk couldn’t help me because he was filling in from London and didn’t know squat. Lovely.

I peered around outside. There seemed to be a stop outside the station, but the board where, assumedly, the bus numbers and routes would be posted was blank; across the parking lot was a small building that might have been a stop and might not. I didn’t feel like dragging myself around in the darkness to no avail, so I went back into the station and asked if anyone knew where the Kidlington bus stopped. Fortunately someone did, and even more fortunately she was going there too. She led me up a long sidewalk to the main road, down a piece, and across the street to a bus stop I’d never have known was there. Hooray for kind English people!

As I got off the bus, my friends waved to me from our Airbnb, which had no porch light, making it impossible to find in the dark. (Coming up in the not-too-distant future: “Airbnbs I Have Known and Hated.”)

It had taken four hours to get from Stansted to Oxford, but I’d made it, and my friends had brought jellybeans and gone grocery shopping, as one of them said, “like 5-year-olds.” Let the vacation begin!

Christ Church College, Oxford, England. Photo mine.

Though the flight was the scariest in my traveling history, I’m not sure the trip as a whole rivals my 60-hour jaunt from San Francisco to Lake Willoughby, Vermont. That was fun. Unable to land at JFK due to weather conditions, we were sent to a small airstrip somewhere northwest of New York, where we sat for five hours without water or facilities. After we’d finally landed at JFK, I joined the hordes trying to reschedule flights, only to find the next available one didn’t leave until the next afternoon. With thousands of stranded passengers fighting for a place to rest, I had to sleep on the terminal floor. In the end my partner, who was supposed to arrive a day after I did, caught up with me at JFK. I can’t say I was overjoyed to see him.

What’s your nightmare travel story? I know you’ve got one, so don’t hold out!

Alla prossima,

Cheryl

© Cheryl A. Ossola 2023

Sorry, no book or poetry recommendations due to being on the road.