Unpronounceable volcanoes

My ability to withstand infuriatingly unhelpful travel agents continues to amaze me. Yesterday I stopped living in 90 min. increments (average wait time for an operator), and resigned myself to the fact that I will get home when I get home. This means that I'm no longer splitting time between keeping my bags packed in case my flight leaves from Munich, walking around the city entertaining myself, and wasting away on hold on the phone. This is a better approach anyway, since now I can relax and catch up on email, and spend time surfing the web again.

I arrived in Switzerland last week, and eventually moved to Germany for meetings. I was supposed to fly out of Stuttgart on Friday, connect to Munich, and then go straight to San Fran by Friday evening. That's when that silly volcano with that unpronounceable name started to mess with a finely tuned aviation system, and all air travel went haywire. Since then, I've taken a train to Munich, scrambled for a hotel over 1,000s of other people (and with the year's biggest convention starting here this week), sat around for three days while my rescheduled flights were cancelled repeatedly, contemplated taking the 8 hour train to Greece or Turkey (only places functioning close to normal), commandeered a rental car, and will be driving to Zurich tomorrow.

We have an office there where I should be able to camp out - perhaps literally as I have not found a hotel room yet. The second-biggest problem right now is finding lodging. People who were supposed to leave, haven't. And people who were in transit have arrived, which means availability in cities is tight. Still, being productive in an office, surrounded by my coworkers who speak the language and can help with travel arrangements is bound to be better than being useless in Munich.

I was on the phone with our travel agent for the umpteenth time this morning, re-booking yet another flight, when she mentioned that I should look into cruise lines. Apparently some forward-thinking passengers booked themselves on ships last week when the airports started shutting down, and many of them are already arriving in the US. Craziness. And it's not like the airlines know more than the rest of us - yesterday I ran into a pilot from Delta and stewardesses from Continental who had no idea when they would be leaving. When I used my Blackberry to look up the latest info on Lufthansa's website on airport closures, they were grateful because it provided them more of an update than they were getting from their HQ. I learned that flight crew are provided with company-issue laptops or cell phones, and instead just rely on wherever they get internet access.

By the way, I'm looking forward to my 3.5 hr drive tomorrow, since the only car that was available, and which I snagged, was a Mercedez sedan. The problem is that it's a manual transmission, which I last drove when I was in high school in Pakistan. I'm not worried though - I maintain that anyone who learns to drive on the streets of Karachi can out-maneuver James Bond in a car chase. I'll get to put my theory to the test tomorrow as I try to navigate out of Munich's old-town , with its classic windy, narrow, European streets, and onto the autobahn.

Possibly the worst part of all this (other than trying to convince my wife that no, secretly I'm not having the time of my life) is that I can't swear at this f#$%!@* volcano properly. It's not like, "Damn Mt St. Helens!" or "shit Pinatubo, why did you have to screw things up?". No, the ridiculous name of this volcano is impossible to pronounce, which makes venting of anger near impossible.

Maybe I'll dial my travel agent again.