trauma of missing your flight

Those who also read along on Amayzine a few months ago may remember that my last trip to New York had a not very happy ending. It is described in full detail here and you have to read it for a while to fully understand my trauma. But in short, it comes down to the fact that I had missed my flight from JFK to Schiphol because I was flying on Thursday night and not Friday night, which I kept thinking. The result of that prank was that I had to buy a new ticket back for 750 euros, and those were 750 very sour euros I can tell you.

The crazy thing is that despite having pretty much fly and travel, suffer tremendously from travel anxiety. As in; I am terrified of missing my flight and my intense aversion to rushing means I prefer to be at the airport three hours before departure, “for you never know.” Besides, I really like airports, so like to take my time to be there as long as possible. This much to the irritation of my travelling companions sometimes, who invariably call me “nitwit” or “dipshit” and are themselves the type of person who, on European flights, do not walk into the airport earlier than 40 minutes in advance.

The crazy thing is that despite flying and travelling quite a lot, I suffer incredibly from travel anxiety.

A few years ago, it also went wrong by the way. Together with my best friend, I was driving from our holiday home in Italy to Pisa airport. It was the first time I would be driving by myself and my father would not be going with me, so he had given detailed directions. The most important thing, as he repeated about a thousand times, was that we would not drive to Grosseto. “Whatever you do Lies, you should NOT go the way of Grosseto, and then you can't really miss it.”

Well, you can already feel it coming, the girlfriend and I have endless conversations, I pay no attention at all and navigate nicely to Grosseto and only when we are right in that village do we look at each other and wonder where the motorway has gone. Really, two bitches in a car, all the clichés are true. And that plane, we had missed it heartily. Somehow, in retrospect, that felt less bad, a new ticket was not that expensive and we had just missed it and not made as stupid a mistake as I did in New York.

A month or two ago, I was given the task of the tickets to New York booking for the past trip. By the way, you might wonder why on earth I had to do that, with my not exactly spotless reputation when it comes to booking tickets. I checked 10 times that I had entered the right dates. A thousand times I checked airports, flight times, everything. Pretty frantic to make another stupid mistake somewhere and then ruin it for two others as well. But it all seemed in the bag and without any problems we fly to New York.

Panic almost bubbled up in vomit form and within three minutes I threw all my stuff in the suitcase

Then the return flight. We flew on Wednesday the 16th, arrived on Thursday the 17th. That Wednesday morning, I am packing the room in a blind panic because the first appointment is waiting and my clothes are really ówhere. If Jet would like to check us in already, I ask her. Once she is in the lobby behind her laptop, an image pops into our New York app group with a picture of her screen, the login image of the KLM site and the message: “Unfortunately it is not possible anymore to check in for this flight.”

THAT WAS THE EXACT SAME NOTIFICATION AS LAST TIME. Panic almost bubbled up in vomit form and within three minutes I threw all my stuff in the suitcase and stormed down the stairs. First out, first a cigarette. Smoking, I grab my phone, check our ticket a thousand times but it really is Wednesday 16 September and it says so on our ticket. It can't have gone wrong. It just CAN'T.

Corpse-white and with eyes so big it looks like I've consumed kilos of drugs, I march into the lobby where May is very calmly eating breakfast and Jet is on the phone further on. With KLM. “Don't worry Liesie, you'll be fine.” HOW CAN YOU STAY SO CALM! I could see it all happening again that I would have to buy three new tickets and I just can't afford that. When Jet finishes calling, the redeeming word comes that there is a glitch in the system and we can just check in at JFK. But everything is fine, and we fly back to Amsterdam that same evening.

Moral of this story? Trauma can go unnoticed. And my travel anxiety never goes away, and only gets worse. Be warned.