In so many ways, summer travel can be a challenge

I’ve been writing lately about the trip to Norway and the ensuing cruise along the country’s famous fjords that my wife, Mary Pat Treuthart, and I took last month. But I’m going to put that tale on pause so that I can relate what it’s like to fly during this period of summer travel.

It isn’t a pretty story.

OK, it does have its high points. Mostly they involve airline employees, two of them at least, who did their best to help out in difficult circumstances. Oh, and of course there were Mary Pat’s savvy trip-planning skills.

Those circumstance began for me on June 10th when I boarded a Delta Air Lines jet bound for Newark, NJ. I was headed there to meet Mary Pat, who had flown out five days before. From Newark we were set to drive to Vermont, then on to do some glamping in the Adirondacks before heading to Brooklyn. After a few days there, we drove to the Hudson Valley for a wedding before returning to Newark to fly home.

Yeah, it was a full agenda. And complicating matters, I first had to get to Atlanta to make my connection. I had barely an hour’s difference between my scheduled arrival time and my next departure, and we got a late start out of Spokane

Things got immeasurably worse when, just as we were nearing Atlanta, our pilot announced that – for some reason that I never did understand – we were diverting to Chattanooga, TN. For anyone who (like me) who is not up on their geography, that’s a 118-mile diversion.

So we landed, the pilot announced, to refuel. The speculation was that because of weather, we weren’t able to land right away in Atlanta. And since we were low on gas, Chattanooga was the closest place to get some.

It was clear that I and a lot of my fellow passengers were going to miss our connections. One woman sitting nearby tried to get off the plane, but she was told that the local airport couldn’t solve her problem. So she stayed in her seat.

We finally got under way. And, yes, even though my connection was delayed, I would still have missed it. Fortunately, I was able to reschedule to a later flight, which was supposed to leave at 10:40 p.m.

Only that flight ended up being delayed, too. And for a full hour no less. This meant that we didn’t lift off until midnight. And while we were in the air for more than two hours, I didn’t get to the Newark airport hotel room that Mary Pat had booked until well after 2:30 a.m.

Here is where I’ll mention my first thank you. The young Delta employee managing the gate that night was everything he needed to be. Working alone, he was calm and totally professional while dealing with a difficult situation. He even took the time to help a woman in a wheelchair onto the plane.

I just wish I had asked for his name to give him a personal shoutout.

All that was just on the trip out. Our trip back was a whole other story. It began this past Sunday when, after enjoying a relaxing brunch at a place called The Foundry Rose in Cold Springs, NY, we decided to take a leisurely drive back down toward New Jersey. We were unconcerned because our flight was set to depart at 6:55 p.m., and right then it was only a few minutes past noon.

Plenty of time. Or so we thought. We were in Sleepy Hollow, NY, of all places, and we thought we might even take time to visit the grave of Washington Irving, author of the short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” But then Mary Pat looked at her iPhone.

“Damn,” she said (or something similar). “Our flight has been delayed.” Worse, it turns out, the delay was for more than two hours.

Which meant, of course, that we would miss our connection in Minneapolis. And though we’d both done it before, we weren’t interested in overnighting again in or around the Twin Cities. So Mary Pat started making a few calls.

And this is where my second thank you comes in. Once she got through to Delta, Mary Pat was connected to the absolutely right employee. The woman went to work looking for another flight, either going out of Newark or the two New York airports – LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy.

She told us that a flight was leaving JFK at 4:55, and when we jumped at it she managed to snare two of the last three open seats. And we thanked her profusely for her efforts (though, again, I’m ashamed that we didn’t get her name). We were going to have to endure the entire 5-hour-plus flight in middle seats, a dozen rows apart, but we weren’t complaining (at least I wasn’t).

That left only the task of driving from Sleepy Hollow to JFK, which is supposed to be less than a 90-minute trip. But if you’ve ever driven in New York traffic, you know how difficult it can be. Imagine driving through Seattle at rush hour for 30 miles or more and you’ll get close to the picture.

But I managed it. Meanwhile, Mary Pat got on the phone to the Budget car rental people and explained the situation. And they, bless them, gave us the OK to shift our rental return to JFK as well.

And so we made it. Tired, sweaty both from the East Coast heat and humidity and from the anxiety. Yeah, we had to run from our arrival gate in SeaTac to make our connection to Spokane. But we arrived in time.

You might think that’s the end of my story. But it’s not.

As our plane began its descent late Sunday night into Spokane, I thought back to the wedding reception that we’d attended the night before. I remembered the exact moment when, as the members of the wedding party danced to a menu of ’80s pop hits, I read on my iPhone the breaking news about the U.S. bombing of Iran.

That provided a somber perspective to what had been the series of relatively minor travel inconveniences that we’d faced.

I’ll strive to keep that same perspective in mind as the summer goes on and more travel beckons.