Gdansk, as I hope to someday expound at length, is a beautiful town. It is attractive in a way that it’s name, like the sound of a car crashing into a bicycle and then the bicyclist sliding across the hood, could never warn you. Getting home from Gdansk seemed simple enough — a quick flight on genteel SAS through Copenhagen.
I’ve always wanted to see Copenhagen. When I heard that our plane had a flat tire and we would be delayed by several hours, I saw the hand of good fortune. It was extending to us — through our missed connection in Berlin — a free night to wander Copenhagen before another flight the next morning. This was foolish optimism.
The booker from SAS was kind enough instead to hand us over to the Polish airline LOT, for a connection through Warsaw with 50 minutes between flights. This felt a bit like a double-date bait-and-switch, to the less attractive member of the airline Star Alliance. “Maybe you make it,” booker suggested with that tone of hopeless resignation for hopeful statements native to Slavic lands. “It is last flight from Warsaw to Berlin.”
With new tickets we’d been officially handed off from our classy Scandanavian airline to the dodgy Polish one and from our night to explore Copenhagen to — what does LOT do for you anyway? A hammock in an aircraft hanger?
The bus at the gate sped past the decent-looking LOT jet closest to the terminal and dropped us at a two-prop mini-plane that I believe was used previously as a cropduster in the Sudan by people with distant connections to al Qaeda.
As my friends and family know, I’m 6′8″. The ride wasn’t pleasant.
We landed, to the screams of a child who had problems with the cabin pressure, hopped into a bus and found ourselves tearing across the airport. Luck was on our side and we found a passport control booth with no line. After scrutinizing the stamps that had been — literally, not figuratively — crossed out with ballpoint pen after we failed to leave the country in Gdansk, he waved us through.
We arrived in plenty of time to be ferried, by bus, back across the tarmac to…exactly the same tiny, two-propeller torture chamber and exactly the same two seats for our flight to Berlin. We made it only six hours later than scheduled, but happy at least to have avoided the hammocks.

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