Holiday Travel: 7 Stories That Will Warm Your Heart
It could be argued that holiday travel brings out the worst in people.
Traffic. Bad weather. Crowds. Combine the already stressful experience of traveling with the high-stress nature of the holidays, and you create a uniquely nasty experience that turns most people into sinners more than saints, more survival instinct than the Christmas spirit. I certainly made this case in my previous article, “Holiday Travel: 9 Things That Make It the Worst.”
Having said all that, like the battlefield that it is, holiday travel can also produce golden moments where the best in humanity shines through.
In these moment, in something of a miracle, stressed-out people turn their attention outwards to lift each other. Busy employees move mountains to help people they scarcely know. Once-strangers suddenly become lifelong friends.
To show you what I mean, I’ve compiled the following seven uplifting holiday travel stories. They just might inspire you to be a little more saintly this holiday season.
1. A Flight Home
In Perth, Australia, a native New Zealander, Jess, had fallen on hard times and was living homeless on the streets. She had recently re-established communication with her family back home but had no way to get back to them. That is, until one man overheard her story and stepped in to help.
Daniel Roose, a father of three who hadn’t previously met Jess, withdrew money from a nearby ATM — enough for her to purchase a plane ticket back to her family in New Zealand — and handed it over to her.
The story was quickly picked up and shared by the news media in Australia and around the world. In one interview, Roose was asked what prompted him to help the homeless woman. He responded:
“ I thought it just takes one person 30 seconds to listen to part of someone’s story and maybe realise it’s not a story, there’s more to this person than just someone on the street, trying to get home to her family, or her sister. That’s all I thought of, to get her home, and maybe a step in the right direction.”
2. Lost and Found
Losing something valuable, something irreplaceable, is always frustrating. But losing something like that while on vacation can be devastating, perhaps because, if not found within a short time, the treasured object could be gone forever. Such was the case with one family spending Thanksgiving vacation in Monterey, California.
The father of the family was holding his wife’s wedding ring for safe keeping when he accidentally lost it, some time during the day’s many activities.
“It was an hour before he realized it was gone and we all spent the next hour backtracking before finally giving up,” his daughter recalled.
Weeks later, the father contacted the police department in Monterey to see if, by chance, someone had turned the wedding ring in. Of course, they knew that chances were slim that anyone had seen the relatively small object, and, if they had, that they would be the kind to unselfishly give up a diamond ring.
To his surprise, the ring had actually been turned into the station.
“They drove down the same afternoon to pick it up,” his daughter said. “A couple visiting from Oregon found the ring and brought it to the station. My parents insisted on repaying the couple for their generosity and, when they kindly refused, donated that money to a local charity in their name.”
3. A Tip For a Trip
A couple living in Texas were expecting their first child. Ben, the father of the child, was from Ireland but, living on a meager waiter’s salary, didn’t have the money to take his girlfriend and child home to meet his family. Until he received a generous gift from a random customer, just before Thanksgiving.
Perhaps during the course of their meal, a customer must have learned about Ben’s Irish origins and his inability to return home to see his family, because at the conclusion of the meal when the check was printed up, the customer added a $750 tip with a note:
“Hopefully, this can get you back to Ireland for the holidays.”
Flabbergasted, his girlfriend Taryn posted a photo of the receipt on Facebook where it was shared over 100 times. She wrote, “Thought I would share it to show everyone that’s there is not only hate out there.”
4. An Accidental Invite
This past Thanksgiving you couldn’t have missed this story which showed up in pretty much every news outlet in the Western Hemisphere, if only for its stark contrast to the racial strife swirling in parts of the U.S. But it’s definitely worth retelling here.
Mesa, Arizona grandma Wanda Dench had been known to open her doors to non-family members for Thanksgiving, but when she sent a text to 17-year-old Jamal Hinton of Phoenix, inviting him to Thanksgiving dinner, it was purely by accident — her grandson’s phone number hadn’t been updated on her contacts list.
After some initial confusion, Hinton accepted the accidental invitation, which by then had gone viral on Twitter and news outlets nationwide, and showed up at dinner with pumpkin pie in hand. It was a perfectly timed story for a nation being pulled apart by class and racial divisions and the results of the 2016 presidential election.
5. A Touching Turnaround
You never hear of a plane coming back to a gate once it has left, except in cases of mechanical problems or other threats. So you know it was unprecedented — and uncommonly kind — when, last December, one Delta airlines pilot pulled an audible to help a family in crisis.
The Short family of Minneapolis was on their way to Tennessee to bury their father after a battle cancer. But their connecting flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix was delayed by 90 minutes, leaving them little time catch their next flight from Phoenix to Memphis. It was to be the day’s last flight to Memphis; if they missed it, they would surely miss the funeral the next morning.
By the time the distraught family reached the gate, the plane had already begun to taxi toward the runway. They broke down crying, seeing their chances of making the funeral slipping away, and began waving their arms to catch the pilots’ attention. The attendants at the gate had already tried to inform the pilots and the tower of the situation, but the tower refused to allow it.
Just when the situation seemed hopeless, the pilots defied the tower, threw the plane into reverse, and returned to the gate to pick up the family.
6. Interview Advice
Think nothing good happens in the subway? Just a month ago, one woman published on Facebook a story about a sudden outburst of kindness on a Toronto subway train toward one man who was late for a job interview.
A Latino man entered the train, looking distraught. A Russian noticed and asked if he was okay and the man responded that he had a headache. The woman offered him an Advil. Another woman offered him a juice box to wash it down with.
The man then revealed that he was running late for a job interview and was extremely nervous about it. Before long, random strangers in the crowd were calming him and offering him tips, cooperating to improve the man’s chances of success.
7. Candy From a Train
As badly as we handle the minor stresses of the holiday season, most of us can only imagine what we would do in a time of war. Just after the close of the Korean War, a company of U.S. soldiers were traveling during the holidays. Knowing that the soldiers often had candy as part of their rations, crowds of Korean children, starving and impoverished in the aftermath of the war, swarmed around the train stations hoping to get sweets. And the soldiers were happy to offer them something.
One soldier recalled, one day, throwing candy out to another group of children when he noticed young girl in the back, too small to get her share of the candy before the older children scooped it up. Moved with compassion, the soldier leaned out of the train window, called the little girl over, and placed the candy directly into her hungry hands.
What Kind of Holiday Traveler Will You Be?
Maybe traveling between Thanksgiving and New Years will always be stressful and unpleasant. But as these stories show, that doesn’t have to define how we act individually as travelers. And just maybe, by recognizing opportunities to help the people around us, we can actually make holiday travel a little less unpleasant for everyone, including us.
