It kind of felt like it was the Armageddon. We were huddled in the windowless kitchen of the hostel–a bright, unusually cheerful bunker. Everyone sat around drinking, discussing their plans for the future, trading exit plans and information. We were all glued to the hostel’s four computers and our cell phones. In between our frantic clicking and texting, we ranted out loud to each other about the sheer incredulousness of it all. Except there was no fire ball–everyone’s flight got cancelled because of an Icelandic volcano, that’s all.
For the two-week Easter holiday I decided to go to Spain, a glaring omission in my European travels. I started in Granada and continued to Madrid. On Wednesday April 17, I arrived in Barcelona–my final stop before home. In vacation mode, I had no access to a television and was only intermittently reading the news. At first it a few people had told me their flights were cancelled because of some volcano thing. They all seemed to be going to the U.K., so the full impact didn’t fully register with me. I was impervious to that thought I could be affected by it.
By Friday, there was enough talk about it that I decided to check the status of my flight from Girona to Karlsruhe-Baden, a city in western Germany, which was scheduled to leave Sunday morning. The Ryanair website assured me that while all flights to northern France and northern Germany were cancelled, mine was okay. So I went about my tourist existence without giving it a second thought. When Saturday rolled around, I could no longer be so high and mighty. All flights to France and Germany had been cancelled until Tuesday. In an instant I was in the same predicament as everyone else: scrambling to get home and finding a place to stay until I did.
As the sheer size of the chaos dawned on me, so did the selection of options to get back, each with their unique difficulties. I was able to rebook my flight for Wednesday but waiting for it meant putting myself up in Barcelona until then and risking the possibility the flight could be cancelled again. (Which it was.) But would there any room left in Barcelona’s hostels or had the spaces already been gobbled up already by travelers whose flights were cancelled before mine? How could I get home short of spending hundreds of euros or spending an entire day on a bus?
Some of these questions answered themselves. The website for the Spanish train system, useless as it ever was, told me they were fully booked. The Eurolines bus system didn’t have any buses leaving Barcelona to any place near Strasbourg until the end of the week. Those who had made the trek to the airport, train and bus stations, told me they were flooded with people. Not speaking Spanish was enough to deter me from going in person, but knowing this eased my guilt for not trying. I felt like as long as I got across the border to France, things would be okay. To make things more complicated work was starting up again on Monday and I had less than 100 euros in my bank account.
Over the course of my vacation, I hadn’t made efforts to befriend any French tourists. But now they became my countrymen. I heard wafts of French drift up from the lobby as I sat in front of the hostel computer trying to find a solution. They must must need to go back or know the best way to do it, I thought. This was how I found out the SNCF, the French train system, was still on strike. Two weeks ago, on the day I left France, they went on strike. At the time, I figured it was another one of those random (and frequent) one-day strikes and didn’t even bother to check what regions or routes were participating. Two weeks later I had completely forgotten about it.
In a word, I was overwhelmed. The only thing I felt like I could do was call my parents and ask them what to do. It was then I realized a few things. The first was that I only had six euros of credit left on my phone and it would be best used to try to find a way back to Strasbourg. (At the time, I didn’t know how to top-up with a credit card. Seriously.) The second, and more chilling of the two, was that my parents couldn’t help me. I was never in a dire situation since they could give me the money to tide myself over until I could get back. But they couldn’t help me figure out what to do any more than I could. What could my parents tell me about the best way to bus or train back? I knew better than my parents did and that was weird. So I sent them an email instead.
After spending hours searching for a solution and finding none, I resigned myself to having a drink with my fellow travelers. At the time of going to bed I had found a flight for Wednesday, a place to stay for free for at least one night, a few leads on getting a ride back to France but no plan. Before bed someone asked me what I was going to do tomorrow. I thought for a second and answered, honestly, “I think I’m going to sleep in.”
One of the leads came to fruition the next morning through Covoiturage, a French rideshare website. In broken French, over the hostel clamour, I found a drive from Barcelona to Lyon for 45€ that evening. My drivers were kind enough to offer me a place to sleep at their apartment since we wouldn’t arrive at Lyon until after midnight. This is how I found myself in a tiny two-door car with two French people, an elderly Spanish woman and a Quebecker for six hours. By the time I woke up in their apartment the next morning, train service had resumed to normal and it was just a hop, skip and five hour train ride from Lyon to Strasbourg.
I had always thought I was incredibly fortunate that, up until now, all my travels had gone according to plan. But now I’m not so sure if that’s a good thing. While everyone in the hostel was frantic and complaining, it was a strange bonding experience. As a person, it was a moment of self-discovery. When things slip out of your control, you find out what you’re capable of. After close to three years of living abroad and traveling, this experience brought out competencies in me I didn’t know I had. Somewhere along the way I learned how to solve problems and speak French. I can take care of myself and it only took a volcano in Iceland to erupt for me to realize that.
Connect