As the title suggests, this is Part #1 of a series where I will be sharing my airport experiences in multiple posts over the next couple of weeks. Not liking airports and not living in your home country is a very bad combination. I travel a lot less now but the first two years after moving to Canada involved a lot of airport visits which I eventually started to dread.
This story dates back to August 2016. My elder sister lived in Oxford back then and I was visiting her for two weeks. If I’m not wrong, this was on our way to Edinburgh and we were at a small domestic airport. Excited for our first trip alone, we were relaxing after getting the boarding passes when suddenly I realized my passport was missing. Then began the frantic search for my most valuable document and the only thing that kept me from completely losing my mind was the fact that our father wasn’t there with us. Our father has that personality where if you mess up, you’re more scared about confronting him than solving the actual problem. We looked everywhere possible and those were one of the many “longest 10 minutes of my life in an airport” moments. Boarding for our flight had already begun by now and there we were, two sisters trying to travel together for the first time but making the worst blunder possible before the trip even started. Terrified, we finally took ourselves to the ‘Lost and Found’ department where the officers verified my name and told me that the passport got to their office a few minutes ago.
So here is the happy ending: we did not miss the flight and no such mishaps happened for the rest of that trip. But this incident definitely marked the beginning of my travel anxiety.
Hope this was dramatic enough for you to come back and read Part # 2. :P