I once read somewhere, “If you’ve never missed a flight, you’ve wasted too much of your life in airports.”

I wish I could live by that logic, but I’m the sort of person who starts getting tense as soon as she realizes she’s only going to get to the airport 2 hours ahead of her flight, rather than 2.5. I don’t even know why — I mean, it’s nice to be able to buy a magazine and read it while sipping a coffee in a departure lounge, but it’s not that nice. The coffee, magazine and view would be better outside the airport, after all.

And the worst of it is, my obsessive earliness for flights hasn’t stopped me from missing planes, so my approach doesn’t even work. And when I have missed a flight, everything has been somewhere between “fine” and “unexpected fun” on a scale of disaster-to-fantastic, so my approach doesn’t even need to work.

Here are some True Stories of Travel Disasters. Maybe they will inspire you to waste less of your life in airports. Continue reading →