Cheap Airfare

[Martin Hash]

Everybody has an Almost-Miss-the-Plane story but it usually doesn’t involve shoes, and it’s odd my story does because I wasn’t wearing any shoes; I was wearing flip-flops. The story begins with my wife, Gwynne, and I saving a lot of money on airfare by not taking any luggage except what fit in our backpacks, and doing a leg of our route via those ultra-cheap Italian flights through Rome.

Gwynne warned me, “We only have an hour layover to transfer; there’s no way.”
“I didn’t know we had to change planes when I bought the tickets,” I apologized.
We travel a lot so Gwynne knows what she’s talking about: “It’s going to be late arriving; we’re going to have to go through passport control for no reason; the connecting gate will be multiple terminals over; and they’ll change it by the time we get there.”
Yep, Gwynne’s always right, but she missed the part about the argument with some other passengers at Immigration for cutting the queue, the bus we had to ride to get out to the plane that was parked midway across the airfield, and my backpack unzipping because we were running so much, spilling my stuff on a stairway. Gwynne’s too.

Stairs s.JPG

During this marathon, there was an urgent About-to-Depart message of the loudspeaker; we couldn’t understand Italian but it was definitely our gate number.
I’m an optimist so even though there was no chance we could make it, I ran faster.
Finally, winded, Gwynne coughing furiously, miraculously we just made it; they were literally closing the gate; optimism wins! The gate person seemed happy too but then, after looking at our tickets, she frowned and told us in her sexy accent we were boarding the wrong plane; ours was the next one.

Gate s.JPG

We slogged back to the main terminal.
I tried to make light of the situation, “Well, at least we can look for my shoes that fell out at some point during the scramble.”
Gwynne exclaimed, “Your shoes!”
“Don’t worry about them; I’ll buy new ones.”
“Your shoes,” Gwynne repeated, pointing; and there next to the garbage can ten feet away were my shoes. Of all the garbage cans in the three terminals we ran through, somebody had put my shoes next to this random one. What a coincidence? I love cheap airfare!

Shoes s.JPG

[TheReal_ND]

The story begins with my wife, Gwynne, and I saving a lot of money

Seems to be a recurring theme

[TheReal_ND]

I do love these stories though.