It had been a short weekend break in Southern France/Northern Spain for four lads, a rugby match to attend in Perpignan on Saturday night so a flight to Barcelona on Thursday followed by a hired car trip over the border into France, a two night stopover there and then a drive back over the border to Girona and a sublime Sunday evening with several hours spent eating before our return home on Monday.
So we arose on the Monday morning, spent an hour over breakfast (well they will make it self service and then not protect the table from return visits), we had all day to kill before we needed to be at Barcelona airport for 3pm so a trip to the coast was called for.
We sat on the beach on a scorching hot Monday morning, they drank beer, I drank iced water (yes, driver again), we sat some more, two of them went for a long swim, I read a book, they went to the beach bar again, time was forgotten…
Then without warning it was 2pm, check-in at Barcelona opened at 2pm, absolutely last check-in was 3.20, flight at 3.40, we were at least one hour away from Barcelona – and we hadn’t factored in the drive from the coast back to the motorway, after laughing all weekend at those TV programmes where stupid people arrive at the airport too late for their flights, we were going to do the same.
If there is a speed limit on the Spanish motorways then we probably broke it, even if the speed limit is 100mph we would have broken it, I did not know that a Europcar Vauxhall Zafira could do those sort of speeds, but take it from me, they can, at least once in their life.
And then there was the Barcelona motorway system to deal with, its chaos, if you are driving to, through or from Barcelona take this word of warning – take a spotter, I had three spotters in the car and even then we barely managed to spot the signs for the airport, not that they were frequent either.
We arrived at the Europcar pound at 3.15pm, car empty of fuel, running on fumes, it should have had a full tank when we returned it. It also had a busted wing mirror from an incident on the Saturday with a parked car and a driver who was not used to left hand drive cars but thats another story, we had sort of clipped the wing mirror back into place, sure it was bashed about a bit but no-one would notice would they, we’d lean on it when they inspected the car.
But we had no time for them to inspect the car, we needed to be at check-in in the next five minutes, and there was a queue to return the keys at the Europcar desk, one of our party shoved his way to the front of the queue and threw the keys on the desk shouting at the man that “its parked out there…” and then we were running, running to get away from the Europcar inspection team and running to catch our flight.
The Jet2.com desk was closing as we ran across the concourse, ran as fast as we could dragging bags and accumulated rubbish behind us, waving tickets in the air shouting “ST-OOOOPPP!!!” in slow motion just like Dustin Hoffman shouts “EL_AAAAIINNNNE” from the gallery at the end of the film “The Graduate”, diving across the counter the solicitor in our group managed to stop the check-in man from removing the tickets from the bag-check machine and with a look of total exasperation on his face the man asked how many bags we had to check-in.
Thrusting four boarding cards into our hands he told us we had five minutes to get to the gate, they were now boarding, we ran all the way, didn’t stop for trivial stuff like passport checks, simply waved them in the air as we flashed past.
The man at check-in had impatiently told us that we had the last four seats on the flight and would have no choice of where to sit, which was fortuitous…
We were the last to board, they were starting the engines as we boarded, we walked right to the back of the plane where the last four seats on the flight were located to find that they were actually the last six seats on the flight and that the check-in man must have allocated the seats from front to back, we had the whole of the back row to the four of us so a spare seat in between each one left lots of room to stretch out – ok, so we were sat next to the toilets, but the flight only cost 10p so thats being a bit picky isn’t it ?
Thats how air travel should be – arrive, check-in, go to the gate, board, go home.
Thats how it isn’t of course, for now you have to park three or four miles away, be transported to the terminal because they don’t trust you not to drive straight through the plate glass windows and set fire to your car, queue for check-in, answer those really tricky terrorist-catching questions about what is in your bag to a person with all the humour attributes of a professional cyclist with piles, queue to be x-rayed, queue to remove your shoes and have them x-rayed, remove half of your clothing to be x-rayed and then hand-searched, have the contents of your bag analysed by a bio-chemist who then x-rays it again just to be sure, have your passport checked at least three times by security guards who consider you, your wife, and your children to be the spawn of Osama Bin Laden and finally pass through the gaze of several armed police officers, and possibly a drugs dog, who all glare at you in the same manner as they would a person who has just assassinated The Queen – and reminding all of them that you are the paying customer would result in a cancelled holiday and up to 28 days in clink without charge under terrorism laws.
Its why I do not use air travel these days…
