By Bob Kaster, published in the Siskiyou News, May 14, 2025
Ann and I are no strangers to international travel. Over the years we have been to Italy, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Greece, Turkey, Peru, Bolivia, Vietnam, Thailand, Bora Bora, Tahiti, Caribbean Islands, Mexico, and Canada; and I’m sure I’m leaving some out. We’ve been blessed.
A few days ago, we returned from our most recent travel adventure, this time to Spain and Portugal. An excellent trip, one we will savor for a long time. But travelling doesn’t get any easier as you get older. Trust me. Especially when there are curve balls or glitches along the way. They are inevitable, and this trip was no exception.
This was a nine-day guided bus tour entitled “Highlights of Spain and Portugal” conducted by a tour company called Globus. The general itinerary was this: two nights in Barcelona, a 385-mile drive to Madrid for two nights, a 354-mile drive through Cordoba to Seville for two nights, and then a 273-mile drive through Setubal and Azeitão to Lisbon for three nights.
Glitch #1 occurred when our flight from the USA arrived at the Barcelona airport around 9:30 AM, behind schedule. The last leg was from Newark to Barcelona and should have been seven hours and forty minutes. But the Newark airport had made (and is still making) international headlines due to a runway closure and disgruntled air traffic controllers walking off the job. So, our departure was delayed an hour or so and upon our arrival at Barcelona our ride from the airport to the hotel was nowhere to be found. (I’m not sure if that was our fault or the tour company’s.) In any event, we had to hail a cab. Not a big deal, but more difficult than at home due to the language barrier. The cab ride cost 38 euros (about 43 US dollars. Euros are worth more than dollars these days. The exchange rate is approximately €1.00 to $1.13.) Globus will refund our €38, so I’ll give this glitch a rating of one. In this story I’ll rate glitches from one to ten, with one being a minor nuisance and ten being brutal.
Glitch #2. On day 3, during the 385-mile drive to Madrid, the bus stopped for lunch along the way. The interior lights of the restaurant flickered once then went out completely. We didn’t think much of it at the time, because we’d experienced power outages before in Europe, usually very local and of short duration. But this one turned out to be a big deal, making international news. This was a total power blackout in all of Spain and Portugal and much of France that lasted till around midnight, eleven hours or so. The bus driver couldn’t get petrol because the pumps weren’t working. It turned out he had (barely) enough fuel to get us to our Madrid hotel destination. We arrived about three hours late because the traffic in the Madrid city center was logjammed due to no working traffic signals. At the hotel the electronic key cards couldn’t be programmed, so the desk clerk had to manually let us into our room. He gave us the card with instructions to go downstairs to the front desk and get it programmed once power was restored.
It’s customary in Europe for each hotel room to have its own electricity master switch. When you enter your hotel room you slip your key card into the slot of the master switch device on the wall next to the door, and leave it there while you’re in the room. The card in the slot triggers on the electric power supply to the room. That night we skipped dinner (except for a couple of little bags of pretzels we received on the airplane) and went to sleep early, as the room was pitch black. Then, miraculously, at about midnight, the lights in the room lit up. Hallelujah!
A heated international public debate still rages about what caused the widespread power outage. Theories include: a deliberate terrorist cyber-attack; grid instability due to high reliance on renewable energy sources; a surge in voltage; the disconnection of power generation sources. In Spain electrical power generated from wind and solar sources is now almost 60 per cent of the total power usage of the country.
I’ll give the power outage a rating of about a four on the glitch-o-meter. This ranks as the highest rating of our trip, compared with other experiences we’ve encountered over the years.
Glitch #3. The original itinerary for our return flight back to the U.S. was: Lisbon to Frankfurt, Germany on Lufthansa Air; then an almost eleven-hour flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco; then San Francisco to Medford, Oregon. Our last morning, we met up with our ride in front of the hotel at 3:45 AM to get to the airport. On the way to the airport, we received cellphone notification that the first leg of our trip, the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt was cancelled. Damn!
The representative at the Lufthansa desk, who could speak English (sort of), was apologetic and very helpful in arranging for alternate flights to get us home. There were no other available flights to Frankfurt in time to make the San Francisco connection, so we essentially had to go back to square one. What we ended up with was on United Airlines, a direct flight from Lisbon to Newark, then to San Francisco, then on to Medford. Ugg! Newark again! But we had to take what we could get, and were lucky to get the last available seats. When we landed at Newark, disembarking the plane was delayed about fifteen minutes to allow officials to evacuate a passenger with a medical emergency. Once off the plane we had to collect our luggage, go through customs, recheck our luggage, then scramble to get from one end of the airport to the other to make the connection in time. But we made it! We finally arrived at Medford by around 9:30 PM and were too wiped out to make the one-hour drive home, so we spent the night at the airport Marriott and headed home the next morning. I’ll give the Lufthansa flight cancellation a two on the glitch-o-meter.
None of these glitches were that bad, really, and they were certainly outweighed by the joys and pleasures we experienced visiting cities in Spain and Portugal.
We’ve experienced travel glitches before, some that make these recent ones seem insignificant. One was in September of 2001. We had been in Italy only a couple of days when, on September 11, the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed and the Pentagon damaged by Middle East terrorists. That event resulted in airline travel disruption for quite a few days, and, if memory serves, all airline flights scheduled to come to the United Staes were cancelled or re-routed to Canada. For us, by the time we got to the end of our planned Italy trip, flights were up and running again, not fully back to normal, but we made it home with little problem. I would give this a two on the glitch-o-meter, as to how it directly affected us. Obviously, as to the larger picture, including the loss of some 3,000 lives, the meter exploded.
The daddy of all the travel glitches for us occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand at 12:51 PM February 22, 2011, NZ time (3:51 PM, February 21, Pacific time). Six of us had just checked in at the Grand Chancellor Hotel, and were unpacking our suitcases on the 23rd and 24th floors when the earthquake hit, causing our hotel to almost topple over. I will give that one a ten+ on the glitch-o-meter. But that’s another story. If you’re interested in learning more, it’s on my website. Here’s the link:
Bob Kaster 