Which Kind of Traveler Are You?

I’ve had countless turned-sideways travel experiences at this point!

A few months ago, I was on a work trip leading a team of fellow scientists to several field sites. We had a tight schedule and long travel times between locations, with a hard stop at the end to attend a conference in a nearby city.

Cut to 10pm the night before our 6am departure to the field, and it appears we do not actually have access to the rental vans to transport anyone. I was the one on the phone with the funding organization, coming up with 12 different game plans until one eventually panned out. The next morning at 5am when I saw the organization lead in-person, she told me how impressed she was with my calm-with-a-touch-of-absurd-humor demeanor over the phone. I told her I give credit to having weathered every possible travel misadventure in the years leading up to this experience. Well, at the time this one particular scenario hadn’t happened to me yet, but now it has!!

(Also ask me about the time I arrived in another country in the middle of the night, and the rental car place had already closed, and some very kind employees didn’t want to abandon me without a car, but also couldn’t fully communicate through our language barrier that they were the overnight team and didn’t do much with the car reservations, so they had no idea which keys went to which vehicles, and we ended up all trudging out to the parking lot together, pushing the lock buttons on an entire bag of car keys until we found a match.)