For some time Eric and I have been planning for a very busy December 3rd and 4th. I had some work that took me to Luxembourg since the night of the 30th and Eric is to leave on the morning of the 4th (as I write this) to fly to Paris and then Lome, Togo, to see his mom. By the best of estimations, our schedules were only going to allow for some 10 hours in overlap on the ground - a stressful amount under any circumstances.
Friday’s travels for me began rather benignly with a faster than expected taxi ride to the Luxembourg airport and the resulting twiddle your thumbs and look for food time. The plane was about 20 minutes late on take off, which seems to be the norm for about all of my European travel thus far. With little turbulence on what was a small plane – carrying approximately 25 of us – I was pleased with a return journey that was allowing me to read some. And then the pilot came on the loud speaker…
French…
Italian (maybe?)…
English…
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We have a small problem. While we have been in flight the air traffic controllers in Madrid have gone on strike. We have two options. We can return to Luxembourg, realizing the next scheduled flight to Madrid is on Sunday night [2 days later]. Or we can divert to Barcelona and you can wait there to see how the situation resolves. We will be taking a vote of the passengers on these options. Thank you.”
You gotta be freaking kidding me! I have planned for a lot of possible travel situations in my days as an adult but there is no planning for this contingency. I immediately begin planning my trip from Barcelona and thinking about the train timetables I studied on a recent trip there, wondering if they might still be cached in my computer’s history.
The flight attendant has begun working her way down the isle, passenger by passenger, repeating in many languages the story from the captain and scribbling a vote along side the name of each passenger on her manifest. Being close to the front, only 4 votes were cast when she reached my row (all for Luxembourg, I might add), which was shared by a young woman who also preferred an English explanation. The attendant and the captain had their stories straight as I detected few inconsistencies but she did let slip more detail. “The strike is planned through at least 1am [about 7 hours later] but we really don’t know as this was unscheduled.” “Don’t worry; we have enough fuel to return to Luxembourg.” Looking back, there is a lot of humor in some of these statements although I only had brief levity waves at the time. I just kept thinking, “how am I going to get home?”
But luck was on my side in a strange way last night and before the flight attendant could finish her polling, the captain was back on the speaker. French, another language, English…”The striking workers have agreed to let any flight that took off before 6 land so it looks for the moment like we are going to Madrid. We will begin our decent in about 30 minutes.” So being on a schedule 5:15 flight that took off closer to 5:45 seems to have been my saving grace. From that point, there was no mention of the event again by the staff and things moved silently like every other flight I have taken. You approach a dark city, seeing only intricate patterns in the lights of the roads and houses. It’s not exactly reassuring to know that your plane is being controlled by someone who isn’t sure they really want to be working that day, but I eventually landed in Madrid. I even made it home in time to tuck Dorothy in.
So, now, I have just gotten a text from Eric, a bit after 6am. He stands in line at Air France, his flight not showing cancelled but the line seemingly endless and doubt invoking. The Spanish military took over the airspace over night. Iberia, the main Spanish airline has cancelled all flights until 11am. Air France seems to be checking people in and taking luggage. Fingers crossed for Eric!
All of this strike I think stems from some of Spain’s recent actions to try to put in place “Austerity” (aka budget saving) measures to build investor confidence and attempt to stave off a run like Ireland and Greece have seen. I certainly wouldn’t expect this to be our last run-in with the backlash to these money saving plans. This strike though should escalate lots of tensions in the country as it's at the start of a long holiday weekend with lots of travel planned. Who would have guessed that with Eric’s first trip to Africa, a land of my travel complexities, he’d be having the hardest time getting out of Madrid. I hope for his sake and his mom’s that this all works out. He’ll make the best out of whatever and if he is to get cancelled or something at least it’s still in his home city so he can come back easily. It’s been an eventful 12 hours for this household’s travel…
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