A week ago today I flew back from Germany to Canada. Except I didn’t.

It is a rather lengthy saga of a 42-hour voyage that saw me, after 24 hours of travel, 100 kilometers further from my destination than when I started.  

The tale bears telling, and will indeed be told here, but before I do I want to give Lufthansa opportunity to respond to my complaints. And in order to do that I have to send them all the details, something I haven’t done because I am on vacation. I was rather hoping they would reach out to me, but so far all I have is a case number. My assumption is that, like all large corporations, they are hoping the complaint will just go away. I got home eventually, so why am I upset? Several reasons actually, but we’ll save those for another day.

What I do have for you today is some rather sad looking sunflowers. They were in a field beside our hotel in Zurich. Zurich was not on our travel itinerary. We were there “courtesy” of Lufthansa. Only took a bus, two trains and an airport shuttle to get there, carrying lots of luggage – but that is getting ahead of our story.

These sunflowers look like I felt – tired and wilted at the end of a long day, but not giving up. Air travel has gone from being an adventure people looked forward to, to something any rational person dreads. Maybe there’s a market for the return of the transatlantic passenger ship. Not as a vacation cruise but just as a way to cross the ocean with some sort of dignity.  

The time for that is probably past though; we are too worried about time to go back to the slower method of crossing the ocean.

That’s too bad – for a while on our voyage last week it looked like a ship crossing might be faster than flying.