Two Cities Have the Same Name and I Flew to the Wrong One

This is a story about not reading carefully, and it has haunted me for years. I was flying to meet an old friend in San Ferro, a mountain town where she had just moved. I found a cheap flight, booked it in about ninety seconds during a work break, felt clever about the price, and did not think about it again until I was standing in an arrivals hall that did not look right.

The first thing wrong was the heat. San Ferro is high and cool, my friend had warned me to bring a jacket. This airport was tropical, thick wet air, palm trees through the glass doors, ceiling fans turning slowly. The second thing wrong was that my friend was not there, and when I called she picked up and said, confused, that she was standing in San Ferro arrivals looking at an empty gate, and where was I.

I opened my phone map and watched the little blue dot settle onto a coastline. A coastline. San Ferro is nowhere near the sea. There are, it turns out, two San Ferros in that country, founded by settlers from the same old town who both got homesick and reused the name, and they sit about four hundred miles apart, one in the mountains and one, where I now stood sweating, on the coast. The airport codes are three letters apart. I had picked the wrong three letters at speed and never noticed the flight was two hours in the wrong direction because I had slept through most of it.

For a while I just sat down on my suitcase and laughed, the useless kind of laugh that is really the front porch of panic. I was in the correct country, holding a photo of a friend I could not reach by road in under a day, in a city I had done zero research on because I had never planned to be in it. No hotel. No map. No idea. My clever cheap ticket was one way, because the return was from the mountain San Ferro, so I could not even simply fly back the way I came.

What followed was the most expensive part of that trip by a wide margin. The only same day flight between the two San Ferros cost more than my international ticket, and it was fully booked. The overnight coach existed but took fourteen hours over a mountain pass and the next one did not leave until the following evening. So I was stuck on the wrong coast for a night and a day, in a beach city full of honeymooners, alone, feeling like the world biggest fool, paying tourist prices for a room I found by walking into three hotels until one had space.

I will say the coast San Ferro was beautiful, in a way that made me feel worse. I ate very good grilled fish by myself and watched families on the sand and thought about how I could have just read the airport code. In the morning I took the fourteen hour coach, wound up through cloud forest into real mountains, arrived at midnight, and finally hugged my friend forty hours late, both of us too tired to be angry, just relieved.

She still calls me the wrong San Ferro. I deserve it. I now read every airport code out loud, twice, before I pay for anything.