Travel
Air travel for me, of late, has been a story of delays. And that is not hyperbole. I have kept track going back more than seven years and not once have I completed an air travel itinerary without a delay or obstruction. The delays and cancellations have been due to the frequent thunder storms, snowstorms, fog, overbooking and the less frequent pilot’s seats that don’t swivel, the unexplained (where conveniently the later plane we were delayed to had just enough seats for both flights) and once a pilot simply did not show up. The airlines have varied from Delta, Westjet, Porter, SAS, KLM, and Alaska Airlines (the most frequent contributor to my airline woes). And they have spanned including Thunder Bay, Toronto, NYC, Montreal, Lexington, Seattle, Kelowna, Chicago, Calgary, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Duluth and once being sent to Edmonton instead Seattle for what seemed to for kicks and giggles (I got a pair of nice wool underwear out that one courtesy of Westjet even though it was Alaska that lost my lugagge). To sum up, I travel the skies with the expectation of delay because I have known nothing else for almost a decade (no exaggeration).
My intinerary for this trip from Duluth to Oslo had me on an Airport Shuttle (10 people in a 10 passenger van) from the DECC in Duluth to Terminal 2 (old Humphrey Terminal) at MSP followed by an Icelandair flight to Keflavik (Reykjavik’s airport) and a flight to Oslo. I was looking forward to the shorter trans-Atlantic flight (under 6 hours to Keflavik) and the seeming easier transfer in there. And then it happened. I was in Oslo exactly when I had planned to be there. No delays except for the extra minutes the immigration woman took to make sure I was who I claimed to be (I looked different than my passport photo, she said. I’ll take it as a compliment as we all know how passport photos turn out). I was happy to experience a seamless itinerary and very tired from not having slept on the flight. I stumbled around Gardermoen (Oslo Airport) and the train station and made it to Joel and Emily’s apartment (my brother and sister-in-law). There I took a quick nap and then went for a walk-about to reacquaint myself with Oslo as well as to ward off sleep. For waking up in Duluth and going to sleep in Oslo it was a good day of traveling.
But I won’t let it go to my head. I am writing this from the SAS lounge in Gardermoen. My flight was overbooked and I was bumped. I’ll add SwissAir and Zurich to my list.
Apocalypse Then 
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