The bad news: I got stranded in Germany for days. The good news: it gave me faith in humanity. |
If you traveled to see loved ones over the holiday break, there’s a solid chance that you experienced the sort of hardship that only modern air travel can inflict upon people. Thousands of Americans were left stranded in the Caribbean over New Year’s thanks to the Trump regime’s invasion of Venezuela. Across the Atlantic, thousands more were stranded thanks a more common, less overtly Nazi form of disruption: the weather. Snowstorms across Europe killed at least six people and triggered a pileup of delayed and canceled flights that remains ongoing.
I was one of the people mired on the European side of the travel crisis. My family and I traveled to Germany for the holidays to see my wife’s extended family … and to eat lots of tasty sausages. We were flying out of Berlin on the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 2. We had a brief stopover in Frankfurt before connecting to a transatlantic flight back to the States a couple of hours later. There is no angst quite like “I hope we don’t miss our connection” angst. We got to the Berlin airport and it said that our first leg was delayed by 10 minutes. Not a problem. I’m a veteran flyer and a regular Zoloft patient; a 10-minute delay ain’t s—t to me. Before passing through security, I’d even packed my winter jacket into the suitcase I was checking. I was just that confident.
I was a fool. The 10-minute delay became 20. Twenty minutes became an hour. Virtually no one in our gate area had Frankfurt as their final destination. Frankfurt is the busiest airport in Germany and a de facto hub for nearly all Western Europe air travel. I went to the gate agent in Berlin and asked for more information. Turned out that our flight hadn’t even LEFT its original airport yet to come get us. Our connection window closed slowly at first, and then all at once.
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Passengers are on the move in Terminal 1 at Frankfurt Airport, Jan. 9, 2026.
At Frankfurt Airport, the display board in Terminal 1 shows a few delays, Jan. 9, 2026. Winter storms snarled European air traffic for days at the start of the year.
My family got on the Frankfurt flight anyway. Airlines don’t rebook your flight unless you complete the process of missing your connection, so that’s precisely what we did. We hopped on an airplane that we knew was headed to nowhere. When we got to nowhere, half the free world seemed to be right there with us. The line for rebooking in the Lufthansa........