What I Learned While Stuck 15 Hours at Seoul Airport

Flexible thinking helped turn a mistake into a family travel highlight

an illustration of a family sitting at an airport while eating food

Flexible thinking helped keep the mood sunny during author Berit Thorkelson’s family day stuck in South Korea’s Incheon Airport.

Kaitlin Brito

Berit Thorkelson,

AARP

Published March 16, 2026

The Seoul airport at 5:30 a.m. felt desolate and starkly absent of the sunshine and vitality of Bangkok. After my family’s two weeks in Thailand visiting street markets, temples and elephant sanctuaries, it was a jarring shift.

No matter. My plan was to spend the daylong layover before our 12-hour flight home to Minnesota exploring the buzzing South Korean capital as a trip finale of sorts.

In search of the train to downtown, we came upon a Transit Tour desk. It was still closed, but we stopped for brochures advertising tempting day-trip options. One key piece of information jumped out: Leaving the airport required something called a K-ETA, or Korean Electronic Travel Authorization, which is generally granted within 72 hours of application.

“What does that mean?” my teenage son asked.

The question was aimed at me, the family planner, schedule keeper and seasoned traveler. The one who had googled “best breakfast Seoul” but never “South Korea foreign entry requirements.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think it means that we can’t go into Seoul.”

split images of a family posing at Bangkok’s Wat Arun and a boy sleeping at an airport

Thorkelson and her family spent two weeks exploring Thailand — including Bangkok’s Wat Arun, shown here — before a layover in Seoul on their way home turned into a daylong airport experience, naps included.

Courtesy Berit Thorkelson

We were potentially going to be trapped for the better part of a day in the familiar republic of international airports anywhere: duty-free shops, bright overhead lighting, coffee kiosks. Our collective mood now mirrored the gray, rainy skies outside.

The four of us trudged to a bright but quiet corner we’d walked past earlier, where we each scored a stretch of seats. With eyeshades on and backpacks as pillows, my husband and two kids took naps while I phoned our airline to try to get an earlier flight home.

By 9 a.m., I’d hit a dead end on booking a new flight, and my attempts at persuading the transit desk clerk to let us sneak on to a day trip — somehow? pretty please? — was met with a final “It is not possible.”

Taking my place alongside my sleeping family, I slipped on an eyeshade and tried to rest. Lingering visions of Korean barbecue and Seoul street markets filled my head.

It can be really hard to let go of what was supposed to be and move on to what the reality is.

Science tells us that the older we get, the more challenging it is to mentally adjust. Loss of flexible thinking is among the many effects of the brain’s age-related rewiring, according to a Psychophysiology journal review of 15 years’ worth of studies. This loss appears to accelerate around the fifth decade, the one my husband and I are currently navigating.

Such mental flexibility is like its physical counterpart, in that without it, we struggle to snap back from life’s ups and downs. Another, more promising, parallel: It can be strengthened through practice.

When plans change, routines shift and health challenges crop up, we can decide to hold rigidly to our frustrations or move beyond them toward openness and adaptability. Doing so helps ward off cognitive decline and introduces the potential for all kinds of other benefits: optimism, broader thinking, an inclusive mindset and overall happiness.

The new vistas, foods and cultures inherent in travel are all great for building mental flexibility. But it’s worth noting that the crappy parts provide opportunities, too, whether it’s working past unexpected closures, disappointing hotels or, say, the daylong fallout from your own planning blind spot.

When the others woke up, I broke the news. We were, in fact, stuck. I chased that info with my working plan: The airport could serve as our day-trip destination.

Bless them and those naps they took; they were all in.

We started with a loop to assess the options, the mood already shifting with potential. The spa was an obvious attraction. But the price for all four of us didn’t feel worth the payoff, especially considering we were fresh off two weeks’ worth of $10 Thai massages.

The duty-free and other airport shops held intrigue, since we had more souvenirs to buy. And there were Korean restaurants and a tucked-away 7-Eleven packed with inexpensive foreign convenience-store goodies, just as there would’ve been in Seoul proper.

Then there was the promise of downtime to complete the homework and listen to the podcasts we’d neglected while locked into nonstop active vacation mode. A block of hours free of scheduled activities was starting to sound kind of nice.

We moved from our makeshift bedroom to a family room, a.k.a. a fresh bank of chairs, to serve as our home base. That 7-Eleven quickly became the day’s sleeper hit. The kids returned again and again, building cultural confidence through exotic candies, random playthings, microwaved noodles and salmon-spiked rice triangles wrapped in seaweed. I snuck in a solo walk. My husband got another nap.

Late afternoon, we strolled to dinner together through now familiar surroundings: shops on the right, atrium gardens on the left, the robot janitor that had wowed us on an earlier lap passing by casually, like an old friend. We dined on bulgogi burgers together at Lotteria, a Korean fast-food chain, and took our sodas and canned Korean beers to go for a DIY happy hour in a fresh bank of airport seating. We’ll call this one the lounge.

There, we snacked on sweets, reminisced about the past two dreamy weeks and looked toward the impending commitments of real life. Outside, planes came and went as the gray sky continued to spit raindrops. I had to admit that the forced rest and connection here in travel limbo, this bubble between plane and destination, vacation and home, felt quite bearable. Preferable, even.

Back home, we eventually got around to our traditional sharing of Vacation Top Three lists. “Spending the day at the airport in Korea” made both kids’ lists.

My initial instinct was to remind them of all the other, better, things we did during our scheduled trip. If getting stuck in an airport constituted a top-three trip memory, why bother with waterfall hikes, elephant bathing and a boat trip on the Mekong?

But I caught myself. Why dwell? They were practicing a skill that will serve them well during dream-trip downturns and other, far more challenging, things travel and life will throw their way. Instead, I laughed and let the magic of flexible thinking play on.

%{postComment}%

Berit Thorkelson is a travel writer and editor for aarp.org. She has also written for publications such as National Geographic Traveler, Better Homes & Gardens and The Minnesota Star Tribune’s travel section.