Travelling sucks, even when the destination is the Olympics

Open this photo in gallery:

Before boarding our night flight out of Toronto, Air Canada staff stopped everyone to introduce a small gang of Canadian athletes and staff getting on the plane. Among them was star curler Rachel Homan.

You could feel a little of the usual travel anxiety leaking out of the crowd. Because if the plane landed in Marseilles by mistake, Air Canada employees would form a human chain to take turns piggybacking Homan over the Alps. This plane had to make it.

We arrived in Munich late. After rushing to the gate for our connector, they announced the flight was delayed. I looked around. No Rachel Homan. That’s when I knew we were in trouble.

There was a “small technical problem” with the gas tank. I didn’t go to plane school, but that sounds like a major technical problem to me. They had to find a new plane.

Eighteen hours of total travel time, three aircraft and a lot of bafflegab in German, German-inflected English and an Italo-German hybrid later, we made it. Plus, the luggage was there. I consider this a Battle of the Bulge-level victory these days.

Canada’s best medal chances at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, according to our experts

Cathal Kelly: On the global Olympic broadcast stage, Canada gets it right

When I told my editor, an exceptionally supportive person, that I was going to write about the travel, he said, “What? Again?”

Then he skedded the column as “KELLY – The Olympics of minor inconveniences Vol. 8.” He may be on to me.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m complaining about going to the Olympics. It’s more correct to say that I am whining about it.

When was the last time you enjoyed travel? I’m not talking about wherever it is that you travelled to. I mean the process of getting there.

Open this photo in gallery:

Travel – in particular, air travel – has become so onerous, so corrosive to the human spirit, that we talk about it in the same way we once discussed war. We ask people how far they travelled in the same way we might once have asked, “How many did you lose?”

You might think the Olympics was better at this. It’s a first-class operation. They have unlimited funds and a lot of practice. But no, not really. The volunteers are great, but everyone always seems surprised when a whole bunch of people show up to the big party the IOC planned.

A couple of days ago, the people running the trains from Milan’s Malpensa airport went on strike. Because why not? It was just one day, and no one made a big deal about it because we take it for granted that travel should be non-stop pain, start to finish.

The multimillion-dollar cable car system that was supposed to ferry spectators and others up the side of the mountain of the women’s downhill in Cortina isn’t finished. This isn’t one of those famous Italian fakeouts where they make like everything’s going to be a disaster, and then pull one out of a hat, and everyone feels good about the fact that the whole thing was a boondoggle. This is actually happening.

So if you want to get to where those skiing events are being staged, you have to schlep up the side of the mountain on a bus. Or walk. Or possibly fly. I don’t know what I’d do, but if I had any choice in the matter, my first option would be “Don’t.”

I tried curling. It was incredibly difficult

You think things would be first class at an Olympics, but they aren’t first class anywhere. First class is the new steerage. There are only two tiers of travellers any more – the ones who can choose between helicopters to get to their private island, and all the rest of us cattle.

This is what we get for treating a regular annual vacation like a holy pilgrimage. The people in charge of getting us there realized that someone that committed on making the journey will put up with any sort of deprivation and/or humiliation on the way.

It’s that feeling you get when it occurs to you as boarding begins to look at your ticket and it says, “Zone 8.” It isn’t until everyone in the entire lounge has gotten on that you realize that there is no Zone 8. Zone 8 must be on the wing of the plane.

Then they make you gate-check your carry-on, making all the hours of planning you put into getting 10 days worth of clothing and supplies into a bag the size of a jumbo Ziploc pointless. There are two places in the world you can experience truly exquisite, saintlike levels of frustration – the hospital and the airport – and we only volunteer to go to one of them.

How do they keep getting away with it? Because once you get to wherever it is you’re going, you feel different. Like yourself, but sharper. No matter where you travel to, the unfamiliarity of that place hyper-tunes your senses. Dealing with the minor inconveniences of travel makes the most useless person feel capable.

Hockey at the Winter Olympics: Who's on Team Canada, the full schedules and everything else you need to know

You may not know how to turn off the main water valve in the house you’ve lived in for 20 years, but you did once have a connector out of JFK cancelled while you were in the air and still managed to get to that wedding. That makes you an internet-age Paul Bunyan.

These Olympics will be like all Olympics, which are like every event that requires travel – they won’t work exactly right. In the moment, it’s maddening. In retrospect, that’s a big part of the fun. Nobody tells good stories about the things that went exactly as planned. There’s a term for that – showing off.

Good stories start with some variation of “You’re never going to believe what happened to us/me ...” and then low-key calamity.

I am convinced this is why we continue to travel, when staying home and reading about it would be so much more pleasant. We seek out the pain of travel. Were the system magically fixed so that everything left on time, bags were never lost and the guy beside you didn’t spend eight hours fighting you for what is, by natural law, your fair share of the arm rest, we wouldn’t know what to talk to each other about.