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This was supposed to be a blog entry about the new movie The Blind Side, the story of Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Michael Oher and his rise from homelessness to the first round of the NFL draft.

I read the book a few years ago and so was looking forward to attending the premiere in downtown Toronto on Wednesday night.

Instead this is going to be a blog entry about “Naylor Travel Luck” the name given by my colleagues to the string of mishaps to have plagued me while on the road for the Globe over the years.

A few highlights/lowlights:

- After flying back from Carolina to my home in Ottawa during a Hurricanes-Canadiens series a few years back, I’d booked a train ticket to Montreal late in the day for the next game in the series. Got to the VIA station to find a bus parked out front, learning that there was some issue on the tracks and we’d be bused into Montreal instead. Busing into downtown Montreal at rush hour meant nearly missing the start of the game, and arriving for puck drop without having eaten a bite all day on my commute from Carolina through Ottawa to Montreal.

- Coming home from a Pittsburgh Steelers playoff game via Washington, the de-icing machine breaks down next to the plane. So they can’t move the plane. So they have to get a tow truck to drag the de-icing maching away from the plane. And by the time they do that the plane has iced-up again.

- Coming home from a Raptors game in Washigton, I stand behind a couple in line who take up 30 minutes of the attendants’ time. By the time I am processed, I’ve missed my flight, but grab the next one, which for some reason leaves late. Just late enough, it turns out, to force me to miss my connection in Philly where I instead go to the bar and drink beer all day with former Montreal Canadiens and Washington Capitals defenceman Rod Langway (true story.)

- Travelling to the Super Bowl in Houston, an ice storm descends on Southern Ontario on a Monday night. I fly from Ottawa to Toronto for a Tuesday morning flight to Texas, only to find every hotel within distance of the airport is booked for a flower convention (true story). I instead trudge to my parents' empty house north of the city where I remain iced-in for two nights.

- Travelling back to Ottawa from a football assignment in Toronto with plans to cover the Renegades game that night. Protestors shut down the VIA train tracks, forcing the train to stop at Kingston where we wait two hours for a bus to take us to Ottawa. The bus arrives too late for the CFL game that night.

- Travelling a direct flight from Ottawa to Chicago for a Bears playoff game and not being able to find my luggage at the carousel. Three days of wearing the same clothes, bag was returned to me . . . five months later! But I got the airline to pay for a new electric razor (true story).

- And the Grand Daddy Of Them All … my trip from Ottawa to Philly for an NFC Championship game between the Eagles and Falcons. It was supposed to be a noon flight that gets to Philly by 1:30 pm on Saturday for the Sunday afternoon kickoff. Instead, 30 minutes after we get in the air, the pilot announces “we only have enough fuel to get to one airport that isn’t shut down” by an East Coast snowstorm. That airport turns out to be the one at Portland, Maine. They drop us off there and tell us to come back the next morning. I go to a hotel, check in and log onto the internet only to see the storm is headed directly for Portland the next morning. So I check out of the hotel, jump an Amtrak to Boston, change trains and stations in Boston in the middle of the night, jump another train to Philly and get there by 5 a.m. Sunday. For those keeping score that trip went like this: cab-plane-cab-cab-train-cab-train-cab.

- I would be remiss if I didn't mention that it was during a travel snafu of not being able to find Dulles airport in Washington after a Baltimore Stallions game en route to Memphis in 1995 that I missed my flight and instead got re-routed through Detroit, which allowed me to meet my future wife at baggage claim when we got to Memphis (true story).

Now, back to the Blind Side. As I mentioned, it's the story of a homeless kid in Memphis who accidentally ends up at a private school where he is scouted and projected to be a future NFL tackle. The book was of particular interest to me because it takes place in Memphis, a city I have been to a zillion times because, of course, of my wife whose entire family lives there.

And so my wife and I headed out from the suburbs to downtown Toronto last night for the premiere, intrigued to see the movie version of the story. (And my wife was more intrigued to see Tim McGraw, the true love of her life). So we are riding the subway at about 6:10 p.m. when they announce the TTC is shut down south of Eglinton Ave. because of some construction issue . That's followed by 20 minutes of sitting or crawling in a tunnel. Then the train is emptied at Eglinton and we are told there are shuttle buses taking people to Bloor St. where passengers headed south can reboard the train.

It is now 6:25 p.m. and we figure we’ll never make the 7 p.m. show that way, so we jump a cab and spend the next 45 minutes in traffic, racking a up a $35 dollar bill that gets us to the theatre just in time to be denied entry.

So no Blind Side, no Michael Oher and no Tim McGraw.

But another great chapter in the analogues of Naylor Travel Luck.