April, 1996 (continued):
After dinner enjoying my first dinner inside a Swedish home, Mats Elg drove me to the Ostersund airport . I flew to Stockholm, checked into a hotel at the airport, went to bed, and arose Friday morning early enough to catch a 6:45AM (!) flight to Belgium, where I would be conducting four seminars in two days.
The first was that very morning — an air talent seminar for BRTN’s Radio 2.
A taxi driver had been dispatched to pick me up at the airport in Brussels and drive me the 40 minutes or so to Antwerp.
My plane arrived on time, the driver was waiting for me, the traffic flowed smoothly on the road to Antwerp; everything went according to plan.
Until we reached Antwerp.
The driver had been instructed to take me first to my hotel to drop off my bags and then on to BRTN. He wasn’t familiar with the hotel, but he had been given the address.
He managed to find the street (Karel Oomsstraat) with a minimum of trouble, but he turned left when he should have turned right. Soon enough he realized his error…and corrected it by backing up half a mile until we were in front of the Kirean Hotel.
Thankful still to be alive, I jumped out, deposited my bags with the hotel manager (who promised to put them in my room for me), and rushed back to the taxi. The morning’s seminar was only minutes away, but I knew BRTN was close by.
In fact, as I climbed back in the driver even said to me, “Don’t worry, it is very close.”
I was reassured by his remark, because I (naively) assumed it meant the driver knew where we were going. But although he had the address with him, the driver could not find the BRTN building.
He located the street quickly enough, but not the address. Somehow he had missed the number the first time around, so he went in a huge circle and, muttering to himself, returned to the general area where he thought it should be.
He still couldn’t find it. So he completed the circle again and muttered more loudly.
We made four complete circles like this, with equal results and increased muttering.
As the driver began to circle for a fifth time, I finally spoke up:
“Look, this isn’t working. We can’t just keep going in circles. You need to stop and ask somewhere where the address is.”
(It occurred to me that perhaps he can find addresses only when he’s driving backward, but I had experienced enough motion sickness for one morning.)
Grudgingly, he stopped and asked someone, who explained where BRTN was located. (It was located pretty much exactly where the address indicated it should be.)
We pulled up to the building and I ran inside, found the seminar room, pulled out my notes, cued my DAT tape (1996, remember), and began the seminar.
