A *bit of a mess* by Thomas & JJ
March 21, 2024 // London Luton Airport, England 🏴
"I can't see a single thing going wrong this whole trip."
Those, I believe, were the immortal words I’d offhanded to Thomas as we swaggered through the sliding doors of London Luton Airport, shooting finger guns and a final farewell wave back at my parents. They’d dropped us off, proud and unsuspecting, like farmers releasing two dim pigs to snuffle for truffles out in the wild. Except in our case, the truffles were adventure, and we oinked our way over to the Wizz Air check-in desk.
Our backpacks were perfectly arranged, our spirits dangerously high, and our confidence wholly unjustified. We were two twenty-three-year-olds, barely a year out of university, fuelled by reckless optimism and discount instant noodles. For months, we’d saved every penny and daydreamed every detail, sketching routes across far-flung corners of the globe between rounds of Thomas hammering me at FIFA in his garden cabin (and his mum bringing out choccie milk in the breaks.)
After a blur of job applications, career anxieties, and listening to my dad slurp tea at the dinner table for six months straight while I lived back at home, everything had finally fallen into place. We’d quit our jobs, lined up our futures, and drawn up a plan that was so certain to succeed I’d have bet my left lung on it. Now all that was left was to slick back our eyebrows and saunter through security like we owned the place.
Within minutes, of course, everything went wrong.
STANDBY.
In an instant, our smug glee at our perfectly lightweight backpacks (11.1 kg and 11.2 kg! We’d even taken a photo) had been replaced by existential despair. Wizz Air, in its infinite wisdom, had overbooked our flight to Cluj-Napoca. Not by one seat. Not by two. But by ten.
“Legally, we can do that as per the Terms & Conditions,” the woman at the check-in desk sneered, radiating all the warmth and charisma of the Luton concrete. She was clearly used to crushing dreams. Between joking with her colleague about weekend plans, she offered a sliver of hope: “You’ll find out if you can board at the gate.” It’s like Schrödinger’s flight, I thought, both doomed and confirmed, as we watched her scrawl ‘STANDBY’ all over our boarding passes.
Thomas, ever the pragmatist, called Chris, our designated travel agent, crisis manager, and admin deity (also, coincidentally, his dad.) It didn’t start great. Thomas had to describe how to open Internet Explorer on the family laptop in excruciating detail, but once Chris had recovered from his digital lapse, he came into his own. Within the hour, he’d scoured our insurance details and conjured up a full contingency plan: Abu Dhabi via Paris, in case Romania passed us by.
Meanwhile, Thomas decided this was the perfect time to browse the Lego store in duty-free. Because if there’s ever a time for playing with miniature Danish plastic, it’s when the next three months of your life are crumbling through your fingers.
Some hand-wavy conjecture soon became full-blown self-scaremongering as we convinced ourselves this was bound to happen again on our follow up flight (if we ever even got there, for that matter.) But just as we began battling the terminal’s lack of signal with frantic attempts to buy seats for our onward leg from Cluj, the departures board interrupted, flashing with Gate 27. We bolted across the airport, crossing our fingers and toes that we might yet be able to salvage our trip.
At the gate, the queue coiled so far that I figured it may as well just zigzag all the way to Romania itself. We were immediately sidelined, clutching our boarding passes like unexpected hate mail as every other passenger filed through, one by one. We stood there, pale-faced and mopey, hope draining from our bodies. Then, a miracle. Six empty seats. Six!
“Go,” said the attendant.
We went.
I slid into my seat, still checking my shoulder as one poor soul arrived seconds too late and was turned away. I felt bad for him. For about half a second.
Touch and go, but we were finally on our way to Cluj. It could’ve been a premature end to the odyssey, but somehow the trip hadn’t collapsed before it’d even begun, and not for the first time. Two months prior, we’d booked a flight to Abu Dhabi via Izmir with Sun Express, a mutant budget airline we’d trusted against our better instincts, made from chopped up bits of Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa. That flight was later cancelled without explanation. We were hardly expecting to be handfed grapes and wafted with palm leaves by flight attendants in bikinis, but when you buy a plane ticket, you do sort of expect to at least reserve the right to get on the plane, and maybe even take off in it.
Cluj? Izmir? Abu Dhabi? What’s any of this got to do with Nepal?
You see, the perfect plan had to be cheap. Cue the next stage of our meticulously crafted masterplan: to brave a late-winter’s night awake in a Romanian airport.
Want to hear what happens next? Coming Soon!