During Thanksgiving break I traveled to be with family, as I’m sure a good portion of students at the U and elsewhere did. As I witnessed, and am now trying to forget, students were far from the only people traveling.
Flying is always a nightmare during the holidays. I am always picked out of the line to be searched, airlines can never find my luggage and I get extremely airsick (yummy, I know). Why does something as simple as getting from point A to point B always turn into such a complicated mess?
With the stress of flying, the pressure of finals fast approaching and the anxiety of spending a week with family, I wondered if there was an alternative to flying that would give me time to study and regroup after a stressful week.
As a service to humanity, I took it upon myself to find a different, and perhaps forgotten, way of travel for college students and travelers everywhere.
Just to make sure I was not giving air travel an unfair assessment, I decided to depart via airplane. Luckily and surprisingly enough, the flight to my destination was relatively uneventful — I didn’t even get pulled out of the security line.
The trek home, however, was an entirely different story.
In an effort to miss the rush at the airports and find a more relaxing way to travel (“travel” and “relaxing” — two words that should never go together without the word “not” somewhere in between), I decided to take the train home. I have never been on a train before (except the Heber Creeper and the one that takes you around to the sad animals at Lagoon), so I figured it would be an experience. Although more time-intensive, the train is quite a bit cheaper. I got up bright and early to board my train — which was going to take twice the time of driving and almost fourteen times longer than a flight — and thought to myself, “Hey, it’ll be a whole day of nothing — I’ll be able to get loads of work finished.”
Well, my train got delayed. Initially I was assured it was only going to be two hours, but after I woke up from my hour nap on a hard wooden bench in the train station, the delay went from two, to four and then quickly to eight hours behind schedule. No bad weather, no missing passengers, just a train derailed right in front of my (now nonexistent) train of relaxation.
Now, just like everyone else in the country, I needed to find a flight that would get me home for school, work and everything else that would resume early on Monday. I had the added pressure of doing it last minute. I also had the thought looming in the back of my mind that if I just would have sucked it up and booked a flight home originally, I wouldn’t have to be doing any of this.
I found a flight and had to rush to the airport at lightning speed because it was the only available flight before Monday that wouldn’t cost me upward of $500. Since my ticket wasn’t booked in advance, I was put on the search list for my good friends in the Transportation Security Administration, but eventually made it to my aircraft just before it was scheduled to pull away from the gate. (I was also a less-than-punctual traveler because of a necessary stop at an airport bar.)
Taking an alternative means of travel really isn’t worth the time or stress. With the end-of-semester travel period looming, please, save your sanity. Either stay home over the break or use the ever-stressful but reliable air travel. It might be expensive, but you’ll save yourself a load of time — and, in my experience, a headache.
