ESCAPE- OLOGY Magazine Issue 2 | Page 34

One cancelled flight and 16hrs in Marseille

So, we have to set the scene for this little adventure. We had been in Monaco for the day seeing how the ‘other half live’, gasping in awe at the sky-rise covered mountains and walking around the Monaco Grand Prix track pretending we had enough money to even buy a Coke there. We were congratulating ourselves on the train for dragging ourselves away soon enough to make it back to Nice in time to grab our bags and run to the airport for our flight back to London.

However, this is when we checked our phone and our blood ran cold; ‘We apologise, FR1875 on 31-05-2018 has been cancelled’. Now, we’ve experience cancelled flights beforehand and it has resulted in overnight airport napping and living on the extremely pricey baguettes which have about half a tomato in them. We were gutted to say the least. After trying to re-arrange the flight on the train whilst zooming in and out of some of the most stunning coast line mountains to no avail we concluded our only option was to get our bags and head to the airport to see what they suggested.

We ran to our accomodation from the station and hop-footed it in an Uber to the airport. When we arrived we realised one, there was no desk for the airline we booked with, and two, our French is awful – if only we’d paid more attention in our French GCSE classes!

Finally, we found the desk of another airline who had been roped into helping all the passengers on our cancelled flight, along with all the other flights which had been cancelled back to London that day due to bad weather – our dad said it was only a light drizzle but if BA cancelled their flights as well you know it’s serious.

Problem number three, the next flight back to London with our airline was five days later and they had no hotels to put us up in or way of funding our living expenses while we wait. All other flights with other airlines had sold like hotcakes, so our options were limited to say the least. Some people had now decided to drive back to England, a gruelling 12-hour drive to Calais, a boat across the Channel and then another three hours back to London. This seemed like our best option and we befriended a dreamy family of four to plan our ‘once in a life time’ road trip… if only!

Then bingo! What if we headed to another part of France and flew from there – if there were flights of course. We were brainstorming Paris, Lyon and pretty much every other major city when our limited geography knowledge kicked in, Marseille. When we checked there were flights the next day – BOOM! Due to all the flights selling so speedily we booked then and there. Then the next issue – how do we actually get to Marseille?! Train was a no go but lucky us, we could get a three-hour coach there. When in Rome hey!

It was leaving in half an hour and we had to make it to the main terminal to catch it. This was the epitome of our Home Alone experience and we bolted. We always see other people running through the airport like headless chickens and arrogantly comment ‘how can you be so late for a flight’ or ‘gosh how unorganised are they’. However, this is our time to apologies.