Traveling is stressful. You’re hoping that everything goes well, but so many things are out of your control. Deep breaths, deep breaths.

Spoiler alert: while the travel day wasn’t perfect, it was pretty good, and I ended up in my hotel in Kuala Lumpur only about an hour late.

Figuring out the timing, I knew that my flight from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur was scheduled to leave at 4:10PM. Given my history on weird check-in processes, I decided to get to the airport with plenty of time, so arrive at the airport around 1:10PM. It takes an hour to get to the Jakarta Airport from the Halim train station, so I needed to be at Halim at 12:10PM. Looking at the schedule for the high-speed train, that meant I needed to take the local train from Bandung Central to the High Speed Train station at Padalarang at 10:38AM.

All of that worked out fine. I got a Grab from my apartment to the Bandung train station and arrived at the station at 10:30. After a quick wait, passengers were allowed to board the local train to Padalarang. The train left on time, connected to the High Speed train on time, and I was on my way to Jakarta.

The traffic to the Jakarta airport was especially bad, so it took about 70 minutes to get to the airport from the high-speed train station, but that meant I got to Soekarno-Hatta Terminal 3 right at 1PM.

Check-in with TransNusa airlines was a breeze. They asked me how long I was going to stay in Malaysia, looked at my paperwork for my ongoing flight to Cambodia to make sure it was within the 90 day limit for US citizens, and checked me in with no issues. This, despite the fact that the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Phnom Penh was on a different airline, and without any drama. Another airline I know of could use a lesson here. Ahem, I’m looking at you, Air Canada.

After a couple of hours at the airline lounge, it was time to head to the gate, and of course, there I found out that my plane was delayed. At first it was just "Delayed.” How long? Who knows? Eventually, the staff said the delay would be an hour.

Well I settled down for my wait, and assumed it was going to be way longer than an hour. Lots of flying has taught me to never believe what an airline first announces as the length of the delay. However, in this case, you know what? The delay was about an hour. Almost exactly an hour, really. Another kudo to TransNusa, and airline so small it has fewer airplanes than Delta has flights between Seattle and Los Angeles each day.

Landing at Kuala Lumpur and getting through passport control and customs was quick. Taking the train from the airport to central Kuala Lumpur and then walking from the Central train station to the hotel, I arrived about an hour later than I had thought, but overall it wasn’t a bad travel day.