That's thinking outside the box

Julia Werdigier and Eric Pfanner have an article in The New York Times about a novel solution to the problem:

For the man who worked at the Ministry of Silly Walks, travel chaos across the Continent was only a modest hurdle. John Cleese, who starred in the high-stepping sketch for Monty Python, was stranded in Oslo on Friday after appearing on a television talk show. With flights grounded by the volcanic ash over northern Europe, Mr. Cleese found another way home to London: He caught a cab.
With no planes flying and no way to get back by train or boat, Mr. Cleese’s agent in Norway, Kjetil Kristoffersen, called a friend who drives a taxi, and he agreed to take Mr. Cleese to Brussels. “He skipped his own birthday party to drive John to Brussels,” Mr. Kristoffersen said. From Brussels, a fifteen-hour drive from Oslo, Mr. Cleese is booked on a Eurostar train to London on Saturday. Mr. Cleese’s journey, with a fare of about $5,140, may have been costly, but it was not necessarily the most cumbersome trip that travelers endured. With flights canceled and trains running out of space, many people resorted to their own ingenuity.
Meanwhile, millions of other travelers were left with no realistic options, caught in a web of misery that reached across the globe. Marthe Loeberg and Susanne Werner of Oslo traveled to London this week with several colleagues from a cancer research center for a one-day conference, but their flight home to Norway was canceled twice. Instead of a two-hour hop, they faced a two-day journey. Their itinerary was set to take them by car to Newcastle, England, where they planned to catch an overnight ferry to Amsterdam and to rent another car to drive to Oslo. “This takes team-building to a whole new level,” Ms. Loeberg said Friday as she waited for a taxi to go to a new hotel in London, after the one where she was staying almost tripled the room’s price. “Our chairman is actually from Iceland, so he’s not that popular at the moment.”
Demand for train tickets between Paris and London caused the Eurostar website to crash several times Friday morning, and long lines formed at ticket counters at Victoria bus station in London, where buses leave for Paris, Amsterdam, and Munich via the tunnel under the English Channel.
Eurostar, which runs trains from Britain to France and Belgium, said there was no space on its 58 trains on Friday, and that places for the weekend were filling up fast. It added three trains to its regular schedule on Friday; it scheduled eight extra trains for Saturday and was planning more for Sunday, too. An additional 17,000 to 20,000 passengers were to travel on Eurostar trains across the Continent on Friday, the company said, nearly double the normal traffic.
“We left Miami on Wednesday,” said Sandy McCreath, 57, who was stuck at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris after failing to find tickets to London, on her way home to Edinburgh. “All we’ve got are summer clothes.”
The Scottish tennis player Andy Murray wrote on Twitter: “Volcano news... we’re all in a van driving to Barcelona.”
Some people resorted to a digital version of the old-fashioned hitchhiker’s thumb. Liftshare.com, a website based in Britain that matches drivers with passengers, experienced “a very marked increase” in international destinations served since British airports shut down, featuring destinations as far afield as Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Stockholm, and Croatia, said Cecilia Bromley-Martin, the communications manager.
While business travelers were trying to get home, some vacationers were unable to get away and were stuck looking at the inside of an airport rather than the sights they had hoped to see.
Birgit Ahr and her friend Alexander Hoffmann had planned to spend five days in Istanbul. Instead, they lay on military-style cots inside Frankfurt airport. They said they had left their home in Erfurt at 2 a.m. Friday to catch an early flight, and now had no idea when the flight would leave. “We had a whole program” of sightseeing, Mr. Hoffmann said, shrugging. “I guess we can’t change anything.”
As tens of thousands of people across Europe found themselves in similar circumstances, nerves were fraying at many airports. “The passengers can’t communicate with the help desk easily,” said Metin Onder, a veterinarian who was stuck at Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris after traveling from Istanbul on business. “In a special situation like this, there must be information. This airport doesn’t have that.”
The ripple effects of the chaos spread far beyond Europe. Some airlines, like Cathay Pacific, which is based in Hong Kong, were advising passengers to postpone nonessential travel to Europe for the next two weeks, creating confusion in airports and travel offices around the world.
According to Eurocontrol, which coordinates European air traffic control, only about 12,000 of the normal 28,000 daily flights in Europe were expected to take off Friday. Nearly all of them were in southern Europe.
As Mr. Cleese made his way southward from Norway, Trine Ruud and Kim Melland Jorgensen, who work for NRK, the Norwegian public broadcasting company, were headed the other way.
Ms. Ruud, who buys children’s programming, and Mr. Jorgensen, who negotiates contracts, were stuck in Cannes after attending an international television conference this week. They managed to rent a car and charted a route across the Swiss Alps and Germany and into Denmark, where they planned to cross the Oresund Bridge to Sweden and drive on to Norway.
With about 25 hours of driving ahead of them, Ms. Ruud and Mr. Jorgensen were hoping to complete the trip in two days but said they were prepared for more setbacks. “We already got lost once, in Nice, but I think we’re on the right track now,” Ms. Ruud said Friday afternoon, by mobile phone from the passenger’s seat, as Mr. Jorgensen steered toward the Italian border. “We’re trying to keep our sense of humor, but it’s a long trip.”

Rico says it's good to be the prince; whipping out five grand for a taxi ride would be painful for lesser beings...