by On Thursday morning I found out that my odds of making it from Luton to Plymouth that evening had been cut from slim to nil, thanks to a sudden shift in UK train times. I found a relatively cheap place to say on Booking.com, some way from the airport. Having booked it, you can imagine my dismay when I received an email requesting a £15 cleaning fee on top of the £40 I was quoted. What a joke.
In the afternoon it was off to the airport. Timișoara airport is in two parts. Before you go through security you’re still in Romania, but beyond the checkpoint is Airportland, where everything is priced in sodding euros. My flight was with Wizz Air. I had to laugh the last time I flew with them, when a group of Romanian travellers commented that Wizz Air “wasn’t as good as Ryanair”, as if Ryanair was some kind of gold standard. This time my flight was delayed by an hour and 40 minutes, so any chance of getting to Plymouth would have been blown out of the water, no matter what the train times were. Wizz Air flights from Timișoara “board” about an hour before take-off, but then you’re kept in a sort of pen until you finally board for real. The experience isn’t very pleasant. I also had to put my hand luggage in the hold.
Two and a half hours after taking off, we touched down in Luton. I then waited at the luggage carousel. And waited. I got to know all the uncollected bags from the previous flight intimately. The carousel took two minutes and ten seconds to complete each circuit: 80 seconds inside and 50 outside. I was in the middle of estimating its speed when bags, including my tiny one, suddenly appeared. I then bought a return ticket to Plymouth from their “travel centre” for a rather ridiculous £112; luckily there was a man supervising the machines who advised me what sort of ticket I should buy. It’s 15 years since I last lived in the UK and I’m now totally clueless.
I then had to get to my accommodation. I’d printed out a Luton map (an anagram of my online name) which only really became useful once I’d exited the confines of the airport. The walk was about 2.5 km. I arrived just before eleven, barely in time to grab a tasty but meagre Chinese takeaway from across the road. The rooms were numbered G (ground floor), F (first floor), S (second floor) and T (third floor). I’d never seen such a system before, and it would have broken down if the building was any taller. I slept well in room S24, but I’ll still hammer them when I come to “rate my stay”, on account of the underhand way they imposed their cleaning fee.
