Just Made it Onto Our Plane!!

Josh and I tried out the car pooling service, Blablacar, for the first time to get to the airport for our flight to Vienna last week.

The trains are *still* not running due to on-going strikes, and the bus tickets are a hefty 10 euros per person each way. So when I found this blablacar option, for 8 euros total, this chronically broke language assistant snapped it up!

I was a little apprehensive since we would only get to the airport one hour in advance, and since we were going on an international flight I wasn’t sure that it would be enough time, but I threw caution to the wind and booked it anyway.

If everything had gone according to plan, getting to the airporta whole hour in advance would have been heaps of time. However, things most definitely did NOT go according to plan…

We got to the meeting point on time but then another passenger was running behind and so we waited ten minutes for her.

The traffic was very heavy on the highway thanks to all the public transport strikes and it being rush hour anyway, so despite our driver’s best efforts at getting ahead of cars and weaving in and out of traffic jams, this added another ten minutes to our drive.

Then, once we got there, our driver made a wrong turn and parked in the wrong terminal’s car park, so we had to walk over to the right one.

By this point in time, I think I’d gone so far past the point of anxiety that I’d entered a new and weird state of equanimity, like, “oh well, better luck next time!”

By the time we’d made it through security, it was twenty minutes to take off, and we knew that the airline was meant to close the gate thirty minutes prior. Sooo we thought we were screwed but of course we’d come too far to just give up.

We ran around in circles a bit trying to locate the gate (the equanimity was back to anxiety again now) and eventually found it and gasped out “Vienne??” The ladies doing the passport control told us they’d been going to close the gate in sixty seconds which did nothing whatever for the old anxiety.

We were the last on the plane but thankfully it all turned out OK! Nothing to stress out over after all…

Next up: a post (or two) on our stay in the very pretty, historical city of Bratislava!