The air surrounding me split in two as a string of expletives erupted from me.
It was 11:00 p.m. and I was lying sprawled in the snow on a sidewalk in London, England. My son James, then 17, was standing nearby trying not to laugh.
“You’re acting like a 50-year-old Caillou”, he muttered as he helped me to my feet. His comment did not help my mood: we had spent 5 hours on a train ride that should have taken two hours, I had lost both my balance and my dignity on this sidewalk, none of the tubes were running, and there was no taxi in sight.
We’d had so much planned for this evening. It was our last day in London, and it had started off well. We’d explored the streets around our hotel, gone up in the London Eye, and taken the train to Birmingham to see a friend. During the train ride back, it started snowing, and the entire London transportation system went into complete meltdown.
We finally made it to our hotel and, having been forced to cancel our dinner plans, ate greasy sandwiches acquired from a sketchy late-night takeout kiosk.
The following day would be better. The following day we were flying to Paris for the final leg of our mother-and-son European adventure.
We woke up to more snow, which in London can only mean one thing: interminable transportation delays similar to what we had seen the previous night. It took us forever to get a taxi to the train station (the tube was a non-starter), but miraculously, our train to Gatwick Airport was not delayed.
The airport, however, was complete bedlam. The previous day, flights into Gatwick had been diverted to other airports because of the snow, and those planes now had to be flown to Gatwick in order to fly hordes of irate passengers out. As a result, our flight was delayed by more than four hours. I spent the time on my laptop, busily rearranging our Paris itinerary to compensate for the delay.
We made it to Paris, much later than anticipated but early enough to make something of the evening. Our hotel was within walking distance of the Eiffel Tower, and thanks to the freezing cold weather, getting last-minute tickets posed no problem.
With tickets in hand, we joined the queue to go in, thinking that our string of mishaps had come to an end. The queue was not very long, but curiously, it did not seem to be moving. It was well below zero, and after about twenty minutes I could no longer feel my face. When I tried to say something to James, my lips were too frozen to form words, and I sounded as if I’d had a triple shot of Novocaine.
Eventually, a man came out of the tower to address the waiting crowd. He announced that the elevator had broken down and that we had to use the alternative elevator which was located in a different leg of the tower.
Immediately the crowd started surging toward where the man was pointing. James, my tall son with a literal track record in competitive running, grabbed my hand and started sprinting. I clung to his hand for dear life as I was pulled along with my feet barely touching the ground, and we were able to beat the crowd into the foot of the tower.
And finally, I got to look down over the night-time view of Paris while standing beside this lanky teenager who is my entire world. I reflected on the events of the previous couple of days – the transportation delays, my fall in the snow and subsequent meltdown, the long wait in the frigidly cold Parisian weather – and I realized that I would not want to change a thing.
The only sure thing in travel is that unexpected things can happen, and when they do, the thing that matters most is who you have standing beside you. That person is an indelible part of your travel story, and it will forever warm my heart that my son is a part of mine.
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