I promised misadventures so here it goes....
My mom always says that the hardest part of traveling is the actual traveling part. I've never quite believed her, as I love airplane and train rides. There's something so comforting about being stuck in a little moving box for six hours with nothing better to do but watch movies or read a book. I seriously mean that, it's like forced relaxation.
After my last bout of travels though, I may have to rethink my feelings on getting places.
I was walking to the train station in Providence, excited for a nice and relaxed 40 minute walk across town, when I looked down at my phone and realized my train left in only 25 minutes. I started to run, and continued running for about 20 minutes. Now this was by far the most exercising I'd done in about 3 months and I quickly got worn out, but I kept going anyways partly because I was determined to be a successful young adult traveler, partly because I really didn't want to pay other $15 for a ticket and partly (mostly) because missing my train would have been super embarrassing.
I was getting super tired and the train left in 8 minutes and it still looked really far away. The whole run/walk I'd been looking for a bus or taxi to get my there faster and just as I turned a corner up a big hill I spotted one! I jumped in and asked him to take me to the train station.
He laughed but said okay. Then he called out to his friend in another cab something in Spanish along the lines of "this idiot wants a ride to the train station!" It turned out that the train station was about 50 ft away. I was so tired though that I didn't care that it cost me $4 to not walk up that hill.
I made it on my train with no trouble after that, and made it through security fine (although about 5 hours earlier than I needed to.) Fortunately the Boston airport has wifi so I found a couch and chain watched Psych for a while.
I was supposed to fly from Boston to New York then from New York to Madrid after a one hour layover. A little before my flight was supposed to leave they announced that the flight was delayed by an hour and a half. Since I wouldn't make my connection, they changed my boarding passes so that I would take a plane to London then to Madrid. Which meant another two hours of waiting.
I finally got to London, only to find out that the plane I was supposed to take had already left! They put me on the next flight and I had to run through the airport to catch it. It was a lot more exercise than I was counting on.
My exchange student Val was supposed to meet me in Madrid. One thing we didn't count on was that I wouldn't have much time in London to tell her when my flight would land. I could only get 15 minutes of wifi at the Madrid airport so we ended up texting through my mom in order to find each other. Eventually we met up and then it was only a few bus rides and a 10 minute walk before I could finally be done with the hardest part of traveling!