From today on, nobody shall ask me for travel advice anymore. Never. I have disqualified myself.
I missed my flight to Morocco.
It happened like this: I always plan in such a way that I get to the airport one hour before departure. The overachievers who show up two or three hours before only have to sit around, eat overpriced and undersized salads and have to stand in the cold when they want to smoke. According to my Google-Calendar-synchronized tablet computer my departure is at 14:55. So I pack my bag at 13:20 and print out the boarding pass. Oh shoot! It suddenly indicates 13:55 as the time of departure. This bloody computer apparently thinks that it lives in a different time zone.
35 minutes is all I have until take-off.
So I hurry down into the street, find a taxi immediately (Targu Mures, this small town in Romania, has about the same number of taxis as New York City) and ask for a ride to the aerodrome. The driver’s name is Janos and on his taxi-driver ID he has a huge mustache like a leftist revolutionary. His driving is not revolutionary at all. He stops for young women with buggies, for old ladies with shopping bags, for school children who are striving towards lunch in masses at this hour, and he drives onto the right shoulder to make way for an ambulance coming towards us. Very nice guy! I don’t say anything because my messed-up planning is none of his fault, and also because I don’t speak any Romanian or Hungarian.
At 13:50 we arrive at Targu Mures Airport which is of course dozens of miles outside of Targu Mures. It is a small airport, one of those calling itself “international” because of a few flights to other countries, but where you can’t even get a newspaper in English. The purple Wizzair plane is easy to spot on the tarmac. It is the only plane. The doors are closed already. Not a good sign. I run into the hall, which is conveniently as small and assessable as the airport itself. There is nobody at the Wizzair counter, or any other counter for that matter. The men who frisk you and who push you through the x-ray frame are sympathetic, but can’t do anything because my large backpack needs to be dropped off as luggage. Too late for that. Once, in Eilat, a plane waited for me as the last passenger for a long time because I was entangled in a very strict and strip-searching security check. But that’s a different story.
With my thirst for action frustrated and my backpack still heavy, I went back home. No wonder that I look a bit depressed upon returning to my cozy apartment.
Consequences and lessons:
- I won’t make fun anymore of people who go to the airport more than one hour before their departure or who check their departure time over and over again. I may still find you square, but you are not entirely in the wrong.
- Preferential means of transport however are trains and ships. There you can show up at the last minute.
- Trying to look for something positive to come out of this mess, I have two more weeks to write now. There are enough stories to tell from my last trips.
- Two additional weeks in Romania aren’t bad either.
- And I also have more time to prepare my trip to Israel in March. But this time I will go to the airport the day before the departure.
- I wish things like this would only happen on return flights. Then you get an extended holiday. I once missed a return flight from New York because I hung out with a girl at the Museum of Modern Art and didn’t want to leave. The other flights to Germany were all fully booked, so I took one for Paris instead (without the girl). This was the first and thus far only time that I went to Paris, purely out of coincidence. But I digress again.
- When I planned my holiday for Morocco, I took such a liking to the country, that – instead of a short holiday – I will rather move there for a few months. By ferry from Spain, just in case.
But now I need a drink and a cigar.
The Happy Hermit 
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Sorry to hear that. Will you get a new flight tomorrow?
No chance. The next one is in a few days, and then I have to coordinate connecting flights. Too complicated and for a remaining time of one week or so it’s almost not worth it.
I’ll rather move to Morocco for 3 months next time and enjoy it without haste.
Well, it looks like you already found plenty of positives, so my help is not needed. :)
But I don’t have TEN positives yet, so your skills are still needed. :-)
If I gave you ten positives, you’d probably not make ANY of your flights in the future. :)
And if everyone was convinced of not using planes anymore, we could reduce emissions. The fate of the planet is in your ten fingers.
Sometimes you are just not luckily, but an extended holiday is not bad either. Make the best out of your time in Romania and enjoy it :)
Well, I can’t really like this because i was kind of looking forward to your posts from Morocco.. gotta love that photo though :)
It might be another year or so, but I will move to Morocco. I enjoyed the planning so much and I found so many places that I want to visit.
I bet! It has been in my travelplans for quite a while now, but this year I chose closer destinations and neighbouring countries which should be exiting too
Sorry to hear about your loss! And c’mon, do not be German, don’t judge yourself so harshly!!! I am sure you have heard of probability theory? So mo you travel, more potential insidents on travel. Who cares whos fault it is?! You have now two extra weeks to practice self forgiveness ;-) And the pic turned out fantastic! Love the bottle, the duvet and the pose. I know it has costet too much for a nice pic. But its nevertheless lovely.
It seems I have to make a poster out of this photo.
And I already see it like that: I have two more weeks in Romania, I have two more weeks for writing.
And, when things turn out bad, I always make me think that god has saved me from smth worse ;-)
There is no god. Or if there is, she does a terrible job of saving many people from worse.
I am not gonna argue on the subject ;-) I know as an experienced ex non-believer that when you don’t believe, you just don’t believe. And people talking about it just seem crazy :-D
When I was reading this I thought this suits quite well to my absent response to a discussion if there is god. https://www.facebook.com/groups/7874404119/10153076507429120/?notif_t=group_activity
There, there. It’s ok. I went to India for a wedding once. Well, two weddings actually. I booked my plane ticket home for the wrong day and missed one of the weddings. Winning at life.
I fit into the square category. Try to get to the airport at check in desk opening time, sometimes 3 hours before the flight, however my motivation is to try and get an exit row seat before they are allocated elsewhere. Being near 6′ 4″ I need the legroom.
I always feel sorry for people with your height when I am on a plane or a bus! People are getting taller, but legroom keeps getting shorter.
that sucks! truly!
Ugh, I similar situation happened to me a little while ago going to Chicago..I only share my shame now because you shared yours. I managed to get a replacement flight but to this day I still partially blame the smug counter guy despite knowing that I should have just left earlier. Unlike your situation however, my plane was still very much there and very much open!! In fact…nobody had even boarded yet!! Which is why I still blame the counter guy!!
So, if you don’t want , your experience in Romania to be just in Tg Mures , you can came to visit Cluj-Napoca , which is bigger then Tg Mures and full of life. If you are interstted contact me for accomodation
Sorry about that- however I’m one of those people who lands up between 2 and 3 hours before my flight at the airport :|
wahahahahaha!!! can’t stop laughing!!!!
So at least something positive came out of it. Don’t ask me to mess up my life even more, just for some laughs!
would LOOOOOVE to have more details about that strip search :P
It was very polite and respectful. I could go to a separate room where I had to wait while more and more of my clothes were scanned.
i call that boring and uninteresting :)
Since it is sharing time, let me tell my flight-missing story.
Two years ago, after a two-week scouting camp in Bosnia Herzegovina, I found a lift by car from Sarajevo to Venice: we drove by night, about one hour each in turn for safety reasons, thus having little and bad quality sleep. I arrived at the airport more than five hours before the flight, so I had breakfast, occupied for a long time an accessible bathroom to wash and get changed, spent two hours going through all those boring airport shops and bought nothing but a newspaper to catch up with current events and finally managed to drop off my luggage, a big backpack, at the check-in desk.
I still had plenty of time so I calmly ate lunch and went through security checks and arrived at the gate half an hour before boarding started. There, I committed a terrible mistake: I sat down on a chair. After a couple of minutes I fell asleep, so deeply that I did not hear the hostess announcing the boarding started and calling my name (three times, as she later said!). I woke up one minute before flight took off, but of course it was too late to let me on the plane, as it already was on its way to the take-off run and they had already disembarked my luggage.
Frustrated and mentally lashing myself as the dumbest person ever, I went to the ticket office to ask for a new ticket, there was only one plane available on the same day, in half an hour, at a very high price. It was my mom’s birthday and I wanted so much to go back home as I was missing since months, so I bought it and started a new run: in only 25 minutes I managed to retrieve my luggage at the lost and found desk, re-drop it off at check-in, re-go through security checks and finally board as the last passenger; all this while shouting at everybody “Please, excuse me, may I go forward? May I skip the line? My plane is taking off!”
As soon as I sat on the plane, I texted friends and family to reassure them I was coming back home, then fell asleep and woke up in Sicily, ready to be mocked by everybody but still happy to be at home.
Thank you very much for sharing this, Alessio!
Reading all these stories makes me feel a tiny bit better. It seems that if we travel often enough, something like this is going to happen one sooner or later. But things gone wrong make for much better stories than things gone smoothly.
Don’t be too harsh on yourself. things happened….and even you were depressed… You still look so handsome :) would you treat your readers with more pictires , maybe more toplesss ones please!!
Did you ever make it to Morocco?
Not yet. :-(
But now that I am back in Europe, I have been thinking of spending a winter in Morocco. It’s close, the flights are still cheap, and I am still intrigued by it. Also, it would be a mild winter.