I Am A Polar Bear

This is one that could do with a keyboard and a desk rather than a phone on a train but let’s start it anyway. I’ve written most of my Kraków stuff but I definitely need an entire post for the 24 extra hours I spent in Poland – at one point believing I was trapped there for the foreseeable future.

The idea was to fly out Friday evening, be back by bedtime on Sunday and stroll casually into work on Monday morning as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately, a Turkish charter plane slid off Kraków’s runway on Sunday afternoon and everything took a big left turn, which meant I didn’t get home until 10.15pm on Monday, having flown from Wrocław. At least I made it back into Bournemouth.

Stage 1 – inconvenience

I turned up at Kraków Airport about an hour earlier than I needed to on Sunday afternoon, which was two hours before my flight, to an odd atmosphere. A lot of coaches right outside, a lot of people queuing inside and a departure board that exclusively listed flights from two or three hours ago up to ten minutes in the future and no further, most of them either cancelled, delayed or being sent to Katowice. My flight was still showing as “check in at desks 23-26” but something felt off. I didn’t need to check in – I’m flying Ryanair, I can’t afford to check in at the airport! – but something was happening and until I knew what it was, I wasn’t going through security in case I needed to come back out. Then there was an announcement that “for operational reasons”, check-in desks 20-29 were closed. I checked my email. I checked the list of departures on Kraków Airport’s website. And then, on a whim, I checked arrivals at Bournemouth Airport, my destination.

Cancelled!

I checked my emails again and there it was, my 7.20pm flight on Sunday was now going at 7.30am on Monday. At this point, it was a minor inconvenience to be dealt with. Find somewhere to stay overnight. The airport hotels were both expensive and inconvenient, what with not being walkable but also not having buses. I checked Google Maps, established that the airport bus ran from central Kraków at ouch o’clock and went back to my boat for a bonus night in Kraków. Work was fine – I can make up the time later, so I’m happy to get the morning flight.

At this point, I’m mentally writing a smug “how to” guide to your flight being delayed.

• Find somewhere to spend the night. You’re not going to get either information or help out of Ryanair so deal with the immediate problem, not spending the night on the street, and file it under “things to take up with your travel insurance when you get home” because you’ve absolutely got travel insurance, right? You’re not leaving the country without travel insurance and you’re definitely not flying on an unreliable airline like Ryanair without travel insurance, right? Right?
• Check whether you can get back to the airport from where you’re staying – no point in having somewhere to spend the night if you then can’t get on the airport bus until it’s too late.
• Clear the next day. Whatever you needed to do, get it sorted. In my case, that meant texting my boss that I wouldn’t be in until lunchtime and I’d make it up on Friday. I have the sort of job where this isn’t a major problem once in a while.
• Download the Ryanair app – I don’t bother normally because I check in before I leave the house and I print my boarding passes, having more faith in paper than in my phone’s battery. But when your boarding pass is suddenly invalid and they’re issuing you a new one, you need the app.
• Download Twitter. While all this was going on, I was still clueless about why it was happening. Nothing at the airport to explain the chaos. Nothing on the airport’s website. Nothing in the email from Ryanair. But Twitter knows. For obvious reasons, I deleted Twitter some time ago but when you find yourself stranded, it’s a good thing to get back, just to keep up to date. So now I knew a plane had slid off the runway and the airport was temporarily closed and I also knew there were no injuries and everyone had left the plane under their own steam. In fact, it turns out the airport is closed. It was closed temporarily for two hours after the incident but so far there’s no word on when it’s reopening. If you’ve never been in a closed airport, it looks exactly like an open one but everyone’s queuing, although they don’t necessarily know what for.
• Get back on the airport bus, preferably before everyone else who’s suddenly going back to the city.

So here I am, back in Kraków. I went to the underground McDonald’s, which was interesting but perhaps not so interesting I’d add it to the “must see in Kraków” list, I saw the main square by night (and the three fire engines and two police cars outside the big church, there for no particular reason, to judge by the utter lack of urgency in any of the firefighters, especially the one who was taking photos of the fire engine as if he was an ordinary tourist excited to see them) and then back to the boat. On Friday and Saturday night, there had been so little motion on that boat that I’d concluded it wasn’t actually floating and was built into the river bank on stilts or a platform or something but on Sunday night, I discovered that it rocks, or at least that you can feel it on the river side rather than the land side. I don’t get seasick but I do get very easily panicked about the possibility of being sick so with that worry, I didn’t sleep very well, even though once I was in bed, it felt as firm as dry land again. And then, of course, my alarm went off at 4am.

Stage 2 – panic

Actually, the church on the other side of the river woke me up donging 4am half a minute before my alarm went off, which is a much gentler way to wake up in the middle of the night. What caused the panic was a text, purporting to be from Ryanair, telling me my flight was going to be at 7.20pm on the Monday, see app for updates. No update in the app. No email from Ryanair. Official channels said the flight was first thing in the morning and I couldn’t afford to not trust that. I knew from Sunday afternoon that probably I’ll get the information two hours before the flight, so I’d get it while I was sitting at the airport and then I’d have to come right back here again but for the time being, I had to act as if the flight is at 7.30am and get up and go.

First mess – despite Google Maps telling me the airport bus ran from the early hours, the bus stop said the first bus is at 4:56, so I now had 40 minutes to just stand around at stupid o’clock in the dark and because I’m me, I decided to use some of that time hiking down to the next stop, which is nearly a kilometre down the road. I kept watching my phone, waiting for the Ryanair app to update and confirm the evening departure before I commited to the bus but nothing.

At the airport, it began to look like the text was a scam. The airport was open again and things seemed to be normal. In fact, the airport officially opened at 00:40 the night before. Everything looked normal with my flight; it even had a gate assigned. I went through security exactly like normal and then I figured I may as well go through passport control since I had a gate already and I sat and waited. A screen lit up over gate 16, declaring that you should “please wait” for the Bournemouth flight and as is the way with Ryanair, a queue of people immediately formed in front of it. But time dragged on and nothing happened and ten minutes before we were due to depart, the screen went blank. Ok, this has happened before. Last minute gate change. No problem. But when I looked at the departure board, the Bournemouth flight is now a blank line. 7.30am Bournemouth, Ryanair, nothing. No “please wait”, no “go to gate”, no “boarding”, not even “delayed”. The gate number had vanished and we began to form little groups and mutter. Everyone had had the text and some people had investigated it, being informed it was an app error. We’re now all starting to believe the text. The boarding pass vanished from the flight on my app. It was still accessible through the “my boarding passes” menu but it wasn’t sitting there attached to the flight anymore, which felt like a really bad sign.

We waited. We talked about the text, we talked about the lack of communication, we talked about how unhelpful Ryanair is and I began to realise that some people expect BA-style customer service from an airline that’s famous for its utter lack of service in all areas. This is the price we pay for our cheap flights. I was sitting by a man in bright orange and lime green, travelling with a woman he apparently hated who was dressed head-to-foot all in purple, and who turned out not be a despised wife but a 90-year-old mother who’s presumably hard work to travel with as she didn’t really seem to be aware of what was going on around her and asked repetitive questions. Besides, it turned out these two had spent the night at the airport rather than go back to Kraków and anyone would be bad-tempered after spending the night in an airport chair. He was flabbergasted that Ryanair would let us get as far as an actual gate when they know there’s no plane for us. I wasn’t. Is this the first time you’ve even heard of Ryanair? This is exactly what they do.

Then the screen popped up with “delayed” and an expected flight time of 19:30, just like the text said! The Bournemouth passengers began to talk about our options. Do we have to sit here for 12 hours? Can we leave the non-Schengen area? Can we leave the airport? Is the flight definitely at 19:30? We were just beginning to decide that the staff were indeed letting us leave these 6 gates and that we could come back later when the new estimated time vanished from the board, leaving the flight sitting on just plain “delayed”. Is it happening at all? Will it be at 7.30 this evening? Will it suddenly appear with a revised time in the near future? We still had no update in the app (the flight itself was now greyed out) or by email. Some people were expecting a Ryanair employee to turn up in person at gate 16 to explain the situation and hand out vouchers because some people still hadn’t figured out that Ryanair vanishes when things go wrong.

I debated my options. I could sit here all day, read, write, eat from the little kiosk and get a “what I did for ten hours at a secure airport gate” blog post out of it. Or I could go to Kraków and spend another bonus day there. But what if the flight was suddenly moved to 9am? Or what if it gets to 7.30pm and the same thing happened with the flight suddenly coming off the departure board again?

Ok, what are my options for getting home by some other route? Very limited, it turned out. There were other flights returning to the UK from Kraków but I couldn’t get on any of them. Either they weren’t available for sale so late in the day or they were hideously expensive. Travel insurance probably wasn’t going to cover “I didn’t want to sit at the airport for 12 hours so I spent £600 on a flight to London”. I looked at flights coming in to Bournemouth in the evening – could I connect to any of them? Eventually I concluded that I can’t. Could I connect to any flights coming in to Southampton, which is a fairly easy trip back across the New Forest to Bournemouth? Nope.

Ok, I settled for just getting to London. At least I’d be back in the UK. Nope. That wasn’t happening either. Could I get a train to another city and fly from there? Warsaw, nothing. Vienna, nothing. Prague, nothing. Berlin – and we’re pushing the reach of a train in a day here by now, nothing. Paris. Copenhagen. There had to be somewhere I could use to get home! There had to be a flight I can get today from somewhere that I could take to somewhere I could connect, even I can’t directly make it back. Come on, I’m a professional travel blogger! (I’ve earned sixty whole British pounds in the last ten years, that counts!) If anyone can figure out this brain-twister, it’s me.

By this point, I’d decided that I no longer trusted this flight. It wasn’t happening. It certainly wasn’t happening until the evening and maybe not even then. I wanted to go home. I left the airport and decided I’d figure it out from there.

Have you ever tried leaving the passport-controlled area of an airport? It’s not meant to be done. Staff are standing by the gate that you’re supposed to enter by and letting us out by it one by one but there’s a lot of paperwork to be done, presumably to update the system on the fact that you’ve left the country but then you haven’t actually left the country. The stamp in my passport gets crossed out. In hindsight, I guess this is an exit booth and they may not have the entry stamp to just stamp you back in again an hour or two later than you were stamped out.

That’s problem one. Problem two is security. It’s a one-way process. I scanned it desperately for an exit and then for someone who looked friendly. Security people don’t look friendly, it’s not in the job description. Alright, look for a woman, youngish. But everyone’s busy. No one’s standing around scrolling TikTok while working security at an airport. They’re all looking at bags, pulling bags aside, manually swabbing people. At last, I found someone who told me “go through there and speak to my colleague”. Are you mad, I’m not walking through a non-public gate unescorted in the security area! So she walked me through, said something to her colleague who took me back through the metal detector and then opened a door that I thought was a wall and I was free.

Now, despite yesterday’s “Ah, this is an inconvenience to be dealt with like a pro” and this morning’s “right, look at your options”, I was kind of teary by now. I didn’t have any options, I didn’t know if I’d be getting home today and I didn’t even know if I’d be getting home tomorrow. No one was telling me anything. But I had enough self-awareness left to go to the little kiosk shop and buy a bottle of cold Coca-Cola and a bar of chocolate, because I was also aware that I’d been up for four or five hours by now, in a relatively stressful situation, and I’d had nothing to eat or drink. Do you know what, by the time the sugar and liquid hit my nervous system when I was sitting on the train into the city centre, I felt a lot calmer. Almost like chocolate is indeed a cure for all emotional woes – or, more likely, that some emotional woes are largely caused by unregulated blood sugar levels.

Yes, I took the airport train. The bus was more convenient for my boat hostel but if I’m planning to get a train out to some other city, I need to be at the station, so train it is. Of course, in my state of turmoil I couldn’t actually figure out how to get to the train platform. I could see the train through the concrete opposite the car park but you can’t walk through concrete. Eventually I walked into the open end where the vehicles come round the end of the buildings and into the drop-off area but everyone else arrived from an escalator at the opposite end of the platform, so I have no idea how they got there.

On the train, with sugar and liquid in me, I began to plan again. Prague seemed like the best option. There was a flight to Gatwick which would get in at 10pm and there was a train which would get me to Prague just in time to get on that flight, assuming it ran on time. The only thing stopping me from booking it there and then was that DB wouldn’t let me book the train online because there was a compulsory reservation which it couldn’t sell me, despite having ticked the “reservation please” box. Of course, getting home from Gatwick at 10pm when my car is at Bournemouth is a minor inconvenience. No trains at that hour, not to get me home, fifteen miles from the nearest station. My dad would probably come to Gatwick but he’d have to get me from the station anyway. It’s not a great option but at least I’m in the UK. A night at a hotel near Gatwick, then, and get myself home on Tuesday? That’s a problem for later, let’s just deal with the immediate one of getting out of Poland right now.

But somewhere between the airport and the centre of Kraków less than twenty minutes later, a picture formed in my mind of a woman leaving the airport while booking a Ryanair flight from Wrocław. A Ryanair flight from Wrocław to Bournemouth, as it turned out. A flight option I hadn’t known existed when I’d booked all this back in July and an option than hadn’t turned up at any point during my morning’s increasingly-desperate attempts to escape Kraków. A flight option with available seats. Ok, check trains. Can I get to Wrocław in time to connect? Yes, I can, but not online. That reservation clause again. Well, instead of booking everything through the German rail network, as is my habit (bahn.de is so good and so comprehensive across all of Europe!), why not book through the Polish one? Because it’s not so easy to navigate and because in four minutes, you’ll be arriving at Kraków Główny anyway. Go to a ticket machine. Again, this wasn’t so easy. Only one ticket machine that I could see and it had a queue. So I went to the ticket desk, where I was slightly scuppered by drilling work twenty metres away. I looked at it dubiously and then began to pull out my phone, figuring I can’t yell over that. As I’m doing that, the man behind the desk helpfully said (I think; the volume of the work is the problem here) “I speak English”, so I went for it, put on my big-girl voice to try to shout over the noise and said “Wrocław!”.

He gave me a ticket, in a proper folding paper thing, highlighted about six things, too quickly and too smothered by the noise of drilling for me to process them properly and I went off with a ticket to Wrocław and six minutes to find the train. I was pretty sure that one of the things he’d highlighted was the platform but I couldn’t identify it. Fine. Find the big departure board. Find the train departing at 10:29. Stand there until it scrolls through enough destinations to see that it’s going to Wrocław. Go to platform 2. Take your seat.

And so I spent three and a half hours rolling through the Polish countryside. I moved from my assigned seat – it was an aisle seat and I was sweaty and probably smelly and hadn’t brushed my hair or eaten and I just didn’t want to be sitting next to a stranger. There was a single seat by a window at the front of the carriage which suited me fine, as long as no one who got on at the next 10 stations had that seat printed on their ticket, but it did put me in front of the main carriage door, which opened using a small green button. Three and a half hours I sat there, watching literally hundreds of people fail to figure out that door. The big obvious green and red buttons next to it operate the sliding toilet door. If you’re strong enough, you can force the door using the handle. What no one spots is the small green button on the opposite side of the door, with a two-way arrow above it, which operates that sliding carriage door. Twenty-odd times I gave up watching these poor lost souls and just got up pressed the button on my side for them. I particularly enjoyed the people who successfully used the small green button to exit the carriage, went into and then out of the toilet and then had a memory-blank where they stood in front of the carriage door and pressed the toilet button and looked bewildered when the carriage door didn’t open. Come on, less than two minutes ago you knew how to open this door! I watched you press the little green button! Remember the little green button? No, remember how less than two minutes ago the big green button opened the toilet? Well, it still opens the toilet now! You need to press the little green button like you did two minutes ago to open the carriage door!!

I had more stuff to deal with now. My plan to get home at lunchtime was utterly destroyed, so another message to my boss, who’d been expecting this all along. A message to the Guide leader – can she pick up the bag of Ranger stuff and take it along tonight? Well done me for being organised enough to have it waiting in the hall, including the activity card! There’s nothing else to deal with today. Today’s new blog post is scheduled and Instagram is scheduled for about the next week, although they’re bottom of my priority list of things to sort out over mobile data from a train.

I had an hour or two in Wrocław for a bit of sightseeing but I saw a lot of the obvious sights last year on the Eras Train Tour and I wanted to be at the airport and sure that I was getting home, so I went there pretty early. It was wonderful to walk into a big glass airport that didn’t have thousands of confused people standing around. In fact, it was pretty empty. All went well. By the time I cleared security, ages before the flight was due, we already had a gate. Of course, we’d had a gate at Kraków in the morning, but I didn’t have a conflicting text message or any ambiguity either at the airport or in the app.

I sat at gate 11, where I’d been told to go at about 5.30pm, despite it saying “boarding at 18:55” and the two flights boarding from gate 11 before mine. The Luton flight went, the last one before the Bournemouth flight. The Ryanair boards and bag checkers went up. The inevitable queue formed. Happy days. Then I began to realise there was no plane. The two previous flights had had planes waiting right outside the window. Not necessarily a problem. Maybe we’re getting a bus to one parked further away. There’s nothing on the board about delays or cancellations. In fact, they’re starting to scan passports and put all the bags through the sizers.

I went on Flight Radar 24 and located a Ryanair plane coming in from Bristol, still 20 minutes away and running three hours late. The next Ryanair flight to depart after our 19:10 one was going to Dublin at 11pm. Were they really planning to leave a Ryanair plane not earning money for eight or nine hours or is this our plane? Or was this in fact our Bournemouth-bound plane? Flight Radar 24 has you covered – it has the itinerary of that very plane. Yes, it was ours. It hops around Europe and back to Wrocław. Paris to Wrocław to Gdansk to Wrocław to Bristol to Wrocław and now it going back to Bournemouth before returning to Wrocław just after midnight. Tomorrow it’s carting passengers from Shannon, Paris and Nottingham to and from Wrocław. Well, there’s no point in queueing, folks. The plane isn’t even here yet. It’s still 15 minutes away, it’s got to land, taxi, get its passengers off, get cleaned and refuelled and whatnot and then we can go.

I’d forgotten this is Ryanair. By the time the plane was at the gate, we’d all been through and were standing in the stairwell. I didn’t even see the previous passengers get off. There certainly wasn’t time for any cleaning. We’d barely finished sitting down before the plane was moving away. By the time the wheels lifted off the tarmac, we were half an hour late, which is about ten minutes later than we’d probably have lifted off if the plane had been sitting there waiting for us. Whatever Ryanair are bad at – and they’re certainly bad at communication and customer service – they’re extremely good at quick turnarounds.

We got back to Bournemouth about 8.45pm, so 5-10 minutes late. I was still watching the Kraków flight which still didn’t have an actual time of departure, or even a plane registration number assigned to it. Oh, those people are not going to be happy when it doesn’t go at 7.30 on the Monday evening! But then I had a brainwave. I went to Kraków Airport on Flight Radar 24 and searched for all departures, rather than the Kraków-Bournemouth flight or the flight code. I scrolled back to the 7.30am departures and found the Bournemouth flight and it was live! Now, it wasn’t the flight I’d expected – wasn’t listed under flights from Kraków to Bournemouth – and it wasn’t the code I’d expected – the code staring at me from the Ryanair app – but nonetheless, a flight had left Kraków for Bournemouth and would be arriving in about an hour and a half. I was happy for the people that had been delayed for now 26 hours that they were getting back. On the other hand, I was sort of disappointed that I’d spent the best part of £300 to gain two hours. Had the flight been delayed until Tuesday, I could be smug that I’d made the right choice in running away to Wrocław. Now…

What I will say is that if I’d left the airport and spent another day enjoying Kraków, I’d have been stressed the whole day about the flight. There were no further updates by email, app or text. The flight vanished from Kraków Airport’s live departures list. I’d have had literally no idea when or even if I needed to return to the airport, or I’d have spent the entire day sitting at the gate wondering what, if anything, was going to happen. Certainty that I was getting home certainly soared once I had that Wrocław flight booked. Being on the move was certainly a good thing. I enjoyed my glimpse of Wrocław, in a sweaty, hungry, stressed kind of way. It’s all better than sitting at the airport for 15 hours and better than stressing about whether I should be hurrying back to the airport. But ultimately, it was all for nothing – and I have yet to find out whether my travel insurance is interested in anything after I left Kraków Airport.

And that’s the moral of the story, I guess. You don’t know what’s going to happen even on a simple flight from your local tiny airport. Make sure you have travel insurance.