Timing and terror on the tarmac
Airports and anxiety are synonymous to me. That's why I'd rather be 5 hours early than 5 seconds late
When they tell you to be at the airport 3 hours ahead of a flight, I try to make it at least 3-and-a-half. I love travelling, but I hate airports. The lines are unpredictable, staff shortages are endemic, and all it takes is a slight hiccup to make you miss a flight and suffer the cascading calamities that follow.
So you can imagine how stressed I was when I realized that I had two choices for getting to the Marseille airport for my flight to Bucharest at 7 am on Monday. I could either take a train from Toulouse and get there 10 hours early, or take an overnight bus and arrive with less than an hour before the gate closed.
Since sleeping in airports or wasting money on hotel rooms that you only occupy a few hours are near the top of my “shit-no” list, I chose the bus option. It cost me sleep over the next few days tho, as my mind would spin with the possibilities of missing my flight. (I’m not an excessive planner, normally, but when I get it in my head that Plan A might be flawed, I put more effort into Plan B than the Allies did for D-Day.)
In penance to the travel gods for having accepted such a tight connection, I showed up for my Toulouse night bus more than an hour earlier than the 12:15 am departure. As I sat in the waiting room, bus drivers kept sticking in their heads, looking for missing passengers. They would to ask if I had a ticket for Barcelona or Lyon or Paris. Not today, I muttered to myself. Today I was heading to traffic jams or road closures or farmer protests on the highway to the Mediterranean coast.
“Non, merci, je vais a Marseille.”
When the Marseille bus finally rolled in, it was now the only bus at the station. It was supposed to load from Pier 8, but had instead parked at Pier 12, as if to re-introduce me to my anxiety. The driver assured me it was the right bus, but his hand, I noticed, was shaking considerably as he scanned the passenger’s QR codes. Shaking to the point that I was surprised his device was able to read the codes.
“Damn. I’m never going to make it to Bucharest,” I told myself. I’m going to die on a bus to Marseille when the driver loses control and drives into oncoming traffic.
As I waited for the chauffeur to scan my code, he was telling a family of four that their ticket was dated for three days earlier. “You missed the bus. Unless you buy new tickets, I can’t let you on.”
I wondered if they had a Plan B for that.
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
You’re probably asking by now why I was going through Marseille in the first place. Good question. You should have asked it earlier, because now I have to re-wind and explain about Casablanca, Estonia and RyanAir.
Flying anywhere in Canada isn’t cheap. It is in fact one of the most expensive places in the world to fly. The reasons are complicated, but can be boiled down to a lack of competition and high costs to airport users (airlines). So when Canadians see what it costs Europeans to fly from London to Paris, we go, “tabarnak. C’est cheap!”
When I began the great travel adventure that inspired this blog, I spent around $600 Canadian, or 410€, to fly from Montréal to Toulouse, by way of Lisbon. Then I checked how much it would cost to fly from Toulouse to Casablanca, Morocco, for the next part of my adventure. Less than $140, about the cost of taking a plane from Montreal to Toronto, which is about one-third the distance.
“Tabarnak. C’est cheap!,” I said. What I really should have said was, “wow, it’s expensive in Canada.” Anyway, after I got to Morocco in December, I kept bumping into people who told me that the main reason they were there was because the flights were so cheap (and it was a lot warmer than home). “I know,” I said, about both the flights and the heat.
But I didn’t know. Not really. Not until I met Olga from Estonia. She was a resident of my hostel in Marrakech who convinced me to help her buy a sun hat and then asked if I could buy her a plane ticket to Barcelona. I forget why she couldn’t use her own credit card, but since she was giving me the cash up front, I was’t worried about anything except her choice in sun hats. It looked like a baseball cap whose brim was on steroids.
So I set up a RyanAir account and bought her the ticket. My jaw dropped when I saw the price:165 Moroccan dirham, or about $23 Canadian, to fly from Marrakech to Barcelona. I think I spent that much on breakfast at the airport in Sydney, Australia, last year.
So, thanks to Olga, I now have a RyanAir account.
We don’t have any truly discount airlines in Canada (see previous link), so I had no idea how deep their prices could dive. But because of the way their markets work, the number of choices they offer from each of the airports where they operate are limited. From my home base of Toulouse in February, the choices were U.K., Morocco and Portugal.
Been there (London), done that (Marrakech), later (Lisbon).
So I started looking for flights from Marseille, which is only a few hours drive from Toulouse—as long as the driver doesn’t crash. That’s where I found Bucharest! I have a Romanian friend back home who had talked a lot about his native land, and I definitely wanted to witness the remnants of eastern bloc communism, so that’s how I found myself on a milk-run to the Mediterranean to get a taste of Romanian.
One of the things that had worried me about Marseille is that it’s one of the biggest airports in France. I was thinking of Heathrow or airports where you have to take trains to get from one terminal to the next. How long would it take me from where the bus dropped me off to get to the RyanAir desk? How long would the lines be at customs and inspection for all those flights? Just in case, I’d paid $30 in add-ons for a rapid customs pass and extra travel insurance.
But when we rolled in at 5:40 am at Marseille’s Terminal 2—home to RyanAir and all the other economy airlines—I was surprised to discover how small it was. The terminal had been custom-built for just for the economy carriers and wasn’t much bigger than airports I’d flown into at Santa Clara, Cuba, or Liberia, Costa Rica.
All the angst that had been keeping me up nights for a week disappeared as I sailed through the checkpoints and customs in about 15 minutes and plunked myself down in a waiting room beside the saddest, loneliest duty-free I have ever seen.
Total cost, once I’d added the extras and a $44 round-trip upgrade that let me take a small suitcase in addition to my knapsack? $173 Canadian to travel 3,360 km, the distance from Toronto to Vancouver.
An amazing bargain, despite the extras and the stress. So thanks for the introduction, Olga. If I ever get to Estonia, I’ll buy you a pitcher of beer. And a new hat.
As for the rest you, I hope you enjoyed this flight and I thank you for supporting Sixty-something airlines.
I always have difficulty explaining to my Italian relatives how large Canada is. When you can go to Portugal for the weekend, a seven hour flight to the other coast is a puzzle.
Glad you made it!