Stuck in Poggibonsi

In January 1996, I was flying back to college in Virginia from Christmas break at home in Amsterdam, when the "Blizzard of '96" hit. I was somewhere over the Atlantic, en route to JFK, when they decided to close all the airports on the east coast from Atlanta northward. The pilot alerted us that we would be landing in Orlando, Florida. I was travelling alone on a standby ticket, which meant no free hotel for me, and no telling when I would be able to get back to school.

I was fortunate to encounter a colleague of my father's working in the Orlando airport who snuck me into the employee lounge to let me avoid the chaos of stranded travellers. She later even took me home with her for a night. Soon after, I flew to Dallas to stay with family friends for the next days of airport closures and bad weather in the Northeast. Despite the good fortune of having kind people looking after me, I couldn't help but think that if I had been a tiny bit luckier, I could have been stuck in the fabulous city of Amsterdam for an extra week instead of the Orlando airport and the boring suburbs of Dallas.

Last week, my travel luck came through for me. After a lovely week's vacation in Italy, I arrived at the Milan airport on Saturday morning to discover that my flight home (via Philadephia) had been cancelled due to bad weather on the east coast of the US. Further, numerous other flights to other American cities had also been cancelled. I was informed that, due to the backlog, the earliest I could possibly get out of Milan was Tuesday morning. After the initial shock that I would be stuck in a foreign country for three more (expensive) days, my next reaction was relief and joy at being stuck in Italy rather than, say, Cleveland. I also had the good fortune of not having to spend those three days alone in the airport. My man and I simply hopped on a bus, a train, and another bus and got to visit the wonderful city of Siena.

Our extended holiday allowed us to see much more of Tuscany and to enjoy a few more days of vacation. We even managed to enjoy the random town of Poggibonsi. We intended to switch buses there on our way back from the medieval hill town of San Gimignano, but we realized too late that we had been reading the weekly bus schedule. It was Sunday. We were only stuck for about an hour and a half, and it became a bit of a joke that we'd much prefer be stuck in Poggibonsi--a town we knew nothing about--than in Philadelphia.