April 3 (UPI) — A Dutch teenager set out for Sydney, Australia, but accidentally caught a flight to Sydney, Nova Scotia, he admitted.
Milan Schipper found a flight from Amsterdam to Sydney which as $300 less expensive than others, so he booked it. It took him to Toronto, and then onto a smaller Air Canada plane which took him to snowy Sydney, Nova Scotia, about 1,200 miles away on Canada’s eastern coast.
“The plane [to Sydney] was really small and so I figured, would that make it to Australia?” He explained that after he boarded, “I saw the flight plan was going to go right, not left. It was about that time I realized there was another Sydney.”
He arrived in Sydney, Nova Scotia, wearing a T-shirt, sweatpants and a thin jacket, as the city of 32,000 faced a blizzard. Sympathetic airport workers directed him to a plane returning to Toronto. He then traveled back to Amsterdam, where his father picked him up at the airport.
“He felt really sorry for me, but he thought only I could do such a thing. He also laughed an awful lot, just like everyone else,” Schipper told CBC Radio. “I only saw the parking lot of the [Sydney] airport.”
An online campaign to help the wayward traveler defray his expenses raised $155 by Monday morning.
