So I have a wildly frustrating silly little money story to share this week that is the epitome of a developed world problem, but here we go.

I am a grad student living in London. Because of this, plane tickets to European countries are very cheap. Plane tickets home to the U.S. are not. A very good friend of mine was sent off on a work trip to Sweden and decided she wanted to stop and see Copenhagen over the weekend before flying home. She invited me to join her and said she would cover the hotel.

I’m still getting used to the idea that a ticket to mainland Europe is very inexpensive, so I told her I’d check the price and for less than $100, I was able to get a roundtrip ticket that let me leave after work Friday afternoon and fly back early Sunday so I could work a matinee that day.

I thought, what the heck? This sounds delightful. Let’s go.

This was a few months ago. If you’ve been reading along over the last few months, you probably know that my main job, digital event producing, has been very, very slow since January. I’m currently making just under 25% of what I normally make and it’s looking like this is essentially going to be what I make this year.

I am a little stressed about money these days.

But the trip was already booked and so I was excited about my Copenhagen weekend and seeing my old friend.

An important thing to know regarding this story is that there have been train and transit strikes in the U.K. for like the last year. The Brits do their strikes very oddly because rather than properly shutting down the country, angering the business owners that their employees couldn’t get to work, and effecting someone with actual power to make a change – they just politely shut down a few lines here and there, just wildly inconveniencing people with no power to make any changes and stretching out their strikes absolutely forever with no results at all.

Sigh.

On the day of my trip to Copenhagen, they shut down the overground rails. My flight was out of Gatwick. Evidently, these overground rails are the only way to get to Gatwick.

A few weeks earlier, I had looked up how to get to Gatwick from my flat because I had never been and it showed I should plan for like a 90 minute journey.

Through a sheer act of luck, my shift was canceled on Friday morning, so fairly early in the day, I opened CityMapper to double check my route from Woolwich to Gatwick for my 7 PM flight and saw a 6 hour bus route with like 9 changes on it.

Which I thought, must be a mistake. I searched all my travel apps and realized that my 6 hours bus route was one option, a 3 hour route that involved going to Heathrow and catching a bus there, or a £75 Uber.

I immediately balked at the idea of the Uber. I rushed to get showered and packed and then double checked my options again and by that point, the 6 hour journey was going to get me to Gatwick at 5:45 PM. This made me very nervous because what if there was extra traffic?

So I hopped on the Elizabeth line over to Heathrow and then tried to find this bus that CityMapper was suggesting. I noticed at that point it wasn’t red – like busses usually are – on the app. It was a weird light blue shade.

It turned out to be a National Express bus. Which needs a special kind of ticket. I rushed to buy a ticket only to find out that bus was sold out. And the next bus. And every bus until after 9 PM that evening.

It is now roughly 2 PM and I find myself a bit stuck at the wrong airport. I look up alternative ways to get from Heathrow to Gatwick and essentially my only option is now a £120 Uber.

So I think, but are there any flights from Heathrow to Copenhagen today? And there is indeed a one way £125 ticket to Copenhagen. This also seems insane to me and I don’t like that I’m not unsure if my other ticket will get me home if I don’t get on the first leg of the flight.

And I don’t trust the extremely budget airline I booked on to be accommodating about any of this in any way.

I notice a message on the bottom of CityMapper about Bolt, so I download it and it seems to have slightly cheaper prices in the £80-85 range for a ride to Gatwick.

So I give in and book the Bolt. I wait 15 minutes for it and suddenly the driver cancels. Yes. This seems par for the course. I try to book a new Bolt. The ride is accepted and then canceled again 5 minutes later.

I consider screaming in frustration but don’t. It is now a little after 3 PM. I give in and book the £120 Uber.

I wait a few minutes and then it also cancels.

So I message the friend I’m supposed to meet up with, though she is also in transit from Sweden to Denmark and doesn’t answer, to let her know I am most likely not making it to Denmark today.

I walk in frustrated circles for a few more minutes at Heathrow before getting back on the Lizzie line to head home.

I have one last thought while on the train and as we resurface from being underground by the terminals, I quickly check to see the odds of an Uber picking me up from the first station outside Heathrow.

There are cars. And the price has dropped to £70 for the Uber.

I get off the Elizabeth line and spend 10 minutes trying to find the Uber driver. It is now close to 4 PM. We head off towards Gatwick.

We get to Gatwick at 6:15 PM. At this point I have largely accepted I am probably not making this flight. But I only have a carry on and my digital boarding pass so – maybe?

Sure enough, I walk right in, right through security and to my gate with enough time to even stop and get a snack.

I tipped the Uber driver £15. The Uber was £70 and my trip to Heathrow was around £20.

I would have saved so much stress and money by just taking the Uber from Woolwich to Gatwick in the first place.

So today I share this story with you in case you ever try to make a cheaper decision that blows up wildly in your face – you are not alone, my friend.

The weekend was otherwise lovely and the trains were running when I returned on Sunday resulting in an easy peasey trip home from the airport.

Also, England, can we just give the train workers a raise to a liveable wage? They are not asking for anything excessive.