the rain in spain

Someday, it'll make a great story. Sunday night, we dropped Gray off at the airport. He was carrying a brand new backpack and wheeling a small suitcase. He was on his way to Alicante, a Spanish Mediteranean port city, where he'll be living with a host family and studying Spanish for six weeks, before spending some time traveling around Spain and France on his own.

In theory, he was supposed to catch a connecting flight from Madrid to Alicante, but it's wet and foggy enough that the airlines have been cancelling flight after flight and Gray's been stuck at the Madrid airport for almost 36 hours.

Gray calls me at work. He's tired and hungry. He doesn't have much money and he speaks only a few words of Spanish. I tell him that everything will be fine and I remember when I, a couple of years older than Gray is now, arrived at the train station in Milan on my way to somewhere else, just as all the railway workers went on strike.

I had no nowhere to stay and, in those days before cell phones, no way to tell anyone where I was. A one-eyed pigeon pecked viciously at the ground in front of me and, as I checked my pockets one more time for my passport, I realized that the only person I could really depend on was myself.

Someday, it'll make a great story and later, Gray calls me back. "I waited in the customer service line for three and a half hours," he says,"Coincidentally, you know what else would have taken me three and a half hours? Taking the train to Alicante."

Someday, it'll make a great story. He's already working on the first draft.

Do you have a nightmare of a travel tale to share?

eta: If you like reading about other people's misadventures, be sure to check out the comments. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll vow never to leave home again.