In the 1987 movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, an advertising executive played by Steve Martin finds himself stranded by a series of epic travel failures as he tries to get home for Thanksgiving dinner with his family. He ends up in the company of a slovenly and over-bearing traveling salesman played by the late John Candy, who sells shower curtain rings. Their flight is delayed, then rerouted to Kansas by a snowstorm. Hopelessly grounded, they go through a series of transportation modes as they try to get to Chicago, each of which fails them miserably…and hilariously.
I feel their pain.
When our daughter let it be known that she was getting married, Carmen and I couldn’t have been happier. When she decided the wedding would be in Highlands, North Carolina, I couldn’t have been more concerned. It is a bucolic mountain town frozen in an era of peaceful celebration of life. It is also, essentially, inaccessible.
Coming from our home in Costa Rica, the best travel options we had reminded me of that movie. Little did I know how close we would actually come. Flights on our favorite airline would take us through two layovers, totaling thirteen hours of sitting in airports. It would have been a day and a half in transit, and we would still have to rent a car and drive the last hour or two. My least favorite airline, I found, does fly direct from our airport to Atlanta. From there, Highlands is a three or four hour drive, depending on Atlanta traffic. Since they don’t land until late evening, I thought it prudent to get a hotel room and do the drive the next day. Proud of myself for nailing this down two months before the wedding, I booked the flights, the hotel, and rented the car.
In the week before we were to leave, a tropical depression rolled across Costa Rica, dumping as much as 35 inches of rain. Literally less than 24 hours before our flight, the airport on our end announced that the runway would be closed for repairs for at least four days. A mad scramble ensued and when the dust settled, I had booked a flight from San Jose, our capital city, to Atlanta. This overnight flight meant that the night in an Atlanta hotel was out. We would land in the morning, get our rental car and hit the road…rushed and tired, but still on time. The hotel in Atlanta, a La Quinta refused to cancel our reservation (Yes, I am intentionally calling them out, as well as Wyndham Hotels, the greedy overlord of La Quinta). They charged me more than $150 for a room we would never use because of a flight that wasn’t happening, because of a runway that was destroyed by a record-breaking storm. Still, La Quinta and Wyndham say, this is my fault.
Moving forward, the tricky part was that to get to San Jose, we would have to drive six hours each way, or take the small planes from a Costa Rican regional operator. We have used these flights before with great success. Not this time.
The morning of our departure, the airline sent us an email stating that the road to our airport was washed out. We had to take an alternate road, which led to the end of the runway furthest from the “terminal”, which is a one-room office with an outdoor waiting area surrounded (I swear I am not making this up) by cows, chickens, goats and a couple of old hounds. The dogs are the closest thing to security that you’ll find at our airport, but you’ll have to wake them up.
Braving the foot-deep potholes and inches-deep mud covering this back road, we defiantly made it to the airport, only to be told, after waiting for an hour, that the airport in San Jose was socked in by fog and our flight wasn’t going to happen. We could wait until the next day, although that wasn’t a good option. Their flights were already booked up, and the chances of squeezing us in were slim. It also meant we would have to rebook our flight to Atlanta, change the car booking, and show up at the wedding mere hours before the three days of festivities were destined to begin…if we could make it at all.
The airline offered, for an extra $100, the option of being driven in a van for the six hours to San Jose. Since our flight wasn’t scheduled until 2 A.M., we would still make it. Of course, this now meant we would be on the road for six hours, spend three in the airport, fly to Fort Lauderdale for a three-hour layover, then hop over to Atlanta, where we would rent the car and drive for four hours. In all, we were destined to spend 36 sleepless hours in transit.
Yeah, not fun. But we would still arrive on Wednesday, the day we planned to get there.
This is the point in the movie where Steve Martin has had enough. He erupts in a torrent of verbal attacks at his unwanted partner, essentially blaming him for everything. He’s not wrong about the things he says, but the hurtful manner in which he spews his volcanic gas destroys the other man.
This is also the point where our stories part ways. Unlike Martin’s character, we kept it together. We worked the problem, made the phone calls, succeeded in navigating the pitfalls being thrown at us as fast as we could deflect them, and pulled it off.
Just as Steve Martin’s character inevitably makes it home for Thanksgiving, so too, Carmen and I have made it to the wedding. Yes, we are dog-tired. Yes, all of the cancellations and last-minute bookings have utterly annihilated our budget for this trip. Yes, we have survived an onslaught of challenges that at some point became laughable, although I’m not sure exactly when that was.
But, with the moment of a lifetime about to unfold in front of us, we would have moved heaven and earth to be here. In fact, that’s exactly what we did. To celebrate this moment, I would happily go through all of that again.
Come to think of it, our other daughter is getting married six months from now. I can’t wait to see what that trip throws at us.
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