Tourists find ways to cope with Icelandic volcano’s disruptions

Published 11:11 pm Thursday, April 22, 2010

‘Trapped in Istanbul” sounds like the title of a bad movie, or maybe a paperback bought at the airport.

The intriguing scenario had something to do with airports, but “Trapped in Istanbul” turned out to be fact, not fiction. It was the subject line of an e-mail sent to me late Friday — early Saturday, Turkish time — by Everett’s Barbara Cashen.

Cashen, 68, was writing from Turkey on what was supposed to be the last day of a nine-day tour with Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door tours, an Edmonds-based travel business. Like hordes of other travelers in Europe, Cashen was exhausted, out of clean clothes, and unsure when she’d get home.

Her itinerary was up in the air, like so much ash from Iceland’s volcano. Quick, say it: Eyjafjallajokull.

Since eruptions first created a high-altitude ash plume earlier this month, more than 100,000 flights have been canceled. The Associated Press reported Thursday that airlines are likely to lose at least $2 billion.

After a “wonderful week,” Cashen and her friend Barbie Eisenberg were welcomed at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport at 4 a.m. Saturday with signs showing “all flights canceled.” Seeing that, the retired Cascade High School secretary said her heart sank. She’d been aware of the volcano, but “it didn’t register that my life would be affected.”

With no flights available until Tuesday, Cashen returned to her small hotel in Istanbul. “Don’t know what we will do for three days,” she wrote Saturday. “Thank God for plastic!”

By the time I met a jet-lagged Cashen in Everett on Thursday, her travel hassles were fading from memory. Those few extra days turned out to be the best of her trip.

“Rick Steves contracts with a tour agency in Turkey. They went way above and beyond,” she said. For an extra $544, she took an add-on flight to Cappadocia in central Turkey. The area is known for astonishing rock formations called fairy chimneys or hoodoos. They look man-made, but ages of erosion shaped the spires.

“Seeing those fairy chimneys for the first time, this whole thing has been a wonderful blessing,” Cashen said Thursday.

While Cashen has reason for her sunny, lemons-into-lemonade attitude, thousands have had no fun at all. Airliners flew over Europe Thursday, but with a huge backlog of passengers, the crisis dragged on.

Karen Smaalders of Mukilteo was scheduled to fly home on British Airways today, nearly a week after she’d planned to leave London. A former Herald reporter, Smaalders was in London with her work as communications manager for the International Association for the Study of Pain. Doctors from around the world were in London for a meeting. As of Wednesday, only those from Germany and Poland had made it home — by train, Smaalders said in a message sent Thursday via Facebook.

“I consider myself one of the lucky ones,” Smaalders said. “I was stuck here, in one of the great cities in the world, in a comfortable Mayfair hotel.” The hardest thing has been missing her 16-year-old daughter, whose father is here in Lake Stevens.

At Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door, tour sales manager Deanna Woodruff said Wednesday that a big problem since ash started flying has been getting customers to Europe. “Most people were stuck in the United States. We didn’t have that many tours running,” she said.

Many clients have rescheduled tours for later this year, she said, adding that the company faced similar troubles after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Coping with an earth-caused challenge during Earth Day week, Woodruff said there’s no sense fretting about future eruptions. “All we can do is deal with what we know today,” Woodruff said.

There’s irony in Smaalders’ situation. Though grounded by volcanic ash this week, she was one of those who took to the sky when Mount St. Helens blew its top. In 1980, she was a fledgling reporter for what was then The Lewis River News, a weekly newspaper in Woodland, a town on the southwest side of Mount St. Helens.

“I was one of the few reporters who flew over Mount St. Helens when it erupted,” she said. “It blew out of the north, which literally saved my life.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.