Woke up in our great Palermo flat totally excited for our trip to Malta—and yet totally oblivious to what the future holds…
The internationally famed Italian acumen for organizational excellence was on full display here in the airport: the cafes with too few tables, the boarding areas with no seats, the employees in the cafes unable to fill the most basic order, etc.
We stood around in the airport here and there for about two hours killing time, our feet getting more and more sore, and then—obviously—our flight was delayed.
We had a tight connection already (well, forty-five minutes) and at first blush we should still be OK to make the next flight… but of course the initial declared delay stretched further and further out. By the time we started to board, we guessed we could still make it but they’d have to get an uncharacteristic move on. And unbelievably, they suddenly did!! People moved, the flight finally boarded, we took off, and then—even better!—we landed!!
But we’d forgotten how Europeans love their airport buses. Here in Italy, one does not land and just walk into the terminal–oh no, one lands, then slowly shuffles off into a giant bus which eventually trundles slowly towards a far-away terminal, whereupon the exhausted passengers slowly ooze their way forth into the new confusion.
But in spite of the delays, there was still hope: we had fifteen minutes to find our gate and make our flight!! We just needed to run and find a flight board, look up our gate, race down the hall and we’d be there in time, barely.
We found the closest flight board, and out of breath we gave the board a quick scan, and then a much more methodical scan: our flight was not there. No such flight at all! We made it to Rome in time only to discover that our Malta flight didn’t exist.
We noticed some others scanning the board in obvious panic–they turned out to be fellow would-be travelers to Malta. We all huddled, phones out, and discovered that our Air Italia flight to Malta had decided to LEAVE EARLY despite at least six passengers coming in only minutes late from Palermo, Sam and I then remembered that we had scratched Air Italia off our list decades sgo for being completely useless.
OK, by now it’s early evening in the Roma airport… in total, we spent about four extra hours there, during which we slowly found someone from Air Italia to speak to, then he directed us through a mysterious door and told us to appear at the Air Malta check-in counter somewhere, at which point this Air Italia guy wouldn’t have to deal with us any more.
So we left security (oh joy), elbowed our way through the zoo that is the Rome airport, eventually figured out that Air Malta checks in at station 79 but nobody will show up until three hours before flight time. So we had another hour to stand around killing time.
We got a couple of beers and a bag of chips—they only sell monstrous bags of like three pounds of chips—and I ended up tossing most of it into the bin. I turned around afterward to see a guy carefully lifting it back out, smell it suspiciously, then begin to wolf them down. Was not expecting that, but I guess it was better than letting them go to waste?
After a while, others who had also missed this connection began showing up at the Air Malta counter, and we fell in with an hilarious couple from Australia and we shared some stories of various missed flights, all so funny in retrospect.
The Air Malta person finally shows up twenty minutes late, spends fifteen minutes studiously ignoring the long fidgety line of all of us waiting, while we make sarcastic remarks regarding this new unexpected delay, but then she finally condescends to look up and speak to us.
Good news is that she quickly rebooked us on the 9:00PM flight. Naturally, Sam’s unfortunately checked bag was lost somewhere in the ether, but when we explained the entire situation she very confidently explained how the bag was certain to miraculously appear once we had landed in Malta (and were safely out of her hair).
So it was back again through security. The Roma airport is pretty big & pretty busy, big enough that they have a couple of Amex lounges. We lost no time in hiking to the closest, a mere forty gates away, all the while carrying my heavy red bag, since the luggage with wheels was still who-knows-where.
We thankfully found the amazing luxurious lounge after escalators, steps, long corridors: “Would you like to get on our waiting list? We estimate only ninety minutes!!”
Oh boy. We’d barely eaten all day, were “slightly“ tired of standing around—obviously they didn’t have any seats here either—so instead of waiting for the lounge we decided to walk the entire way back to the Eatily restaurant, upstairs far away somewhere. Amazingly they could seat us, and we killed maybe an hour pretending to enjoy a very nauseating dried pizza-like food pile, all the while breathing in fresh cigarette smoke from the chain-smoking staff taking their continuous cigarette breaks not five feet away from us.
We were worried about our flight and kept checking the board. The board refused to even show our flight: it turns out they don’t announce flights or gates until the last minute–why not? But when it does show up, we speed through the clueless meandering Italian mobs and get there with plenty of time to spare. Especially since it’s delayed…
Sam gets a major brain wave at this point and she emails our Malta hotel to say that we’re arriving a bit late.
We’d been talking about how we were quite relieved to be in an actual hotel again because we were a bit tired of the whole “having to arrange a time to meet up and be let into the apartment” Airbnb routine. With a hotel, you just show up! If you are too early you can drop off your bags, no fuss no muss. WooHoo for hotels!!!
Sam got a return email expressing regret that we were arriving late, and unfortunately reception closes at 10PM. There would be no one there, no staff whatsoever, and sadly the front door would be locked.
However, they did leave us a mysterious code for the front door, and told us that if we got inside, a key to our room would be waiting for us at the front desk. OK I guess we can work with that. Meanwhile, the rain here has started, but on the bright side boarding has begun: at least we can finally file into our freaking bus to finally get to the plane.
So we land around midnight I guess, and the first task is to file a report about our missing luggage… then we have to figure out the very confusing taxi situation (you find part of it over here, where you pay, then take your papers over there where an actual person finally leads you away). The actual person of course is the driver: a suicidal speed demon. Plus, we’re back on British driving rules, i.e. the wrong side of the road, which makes everything even more terrifying. And it’s at night, in the rain, with no idea at all of where we’re headed.
Cabbie screeches to a halt suddenly, and says we’re here at our tiny boutique hotel! We get out: street is deserted as far as the eye can see, it’s as lonely a spot as you can imagine. But against all odds, we do find a keypad by a door so we use our exciting code on it!!
Nothing. We use our code again: nada. We ask our cabbie to try in case there’s some bizarre European nuance we’re missing out on: no luck. Cars are finally stacking up behind our cab so we just let him go. The other cars move on, and the empty street returns to dead silence, the rainy middle-of-the-night-with-nowhere-to-go dead silence.
I bravely try the code one more time, for luck—nope. We look up the street, down the street, finally at each other: no answers there either 😂
But in our exhausted state, I notice something odd: this address number is wrong, our cab has dropped us at the wrong place, we’re standing around by #236 while we’re supposed to be at #101!!
We look up and down the street, figure out which direction the numbers decrease, and down the street we go. Looks like maybe a quarter mile should do it, hiking up & down the steep Malta streets. But the street suddenly stops before we can get to #101. It just absolutely comes to an end.
So back to GPS, which *really* thinks we should be back up the street where we began… so back we march. Literally back to the original spot, with the tantalizingly lit keypad mocking us from the deserted street. It’s probably around 1:00AM by now.
We start thinking of trying to find a new hotel for the night—any hotel! But the streets are dark and silent, no hotels to be seen. We start going from door to door, any door with a light, and finally discover another tiny boutique hotel but this one actually has someone inside!! He is very helpful, and calls our hotel (of course there’s no one there to answer). Finally he says he knows there are two phone numbers for it, they are written outside the door! We said we saw no numbers at all, but does he have a room for the night please?? Nope he is fully booked, but he will try the other number, and heads out the door to go read it. But instead of returning down the street, he stuns us all by going *across the street*!!!!! !doh! All this time, our hotel (with absolutely no signage), number 101, was directly across the street from number 236… who knew?
And lo, there was a keypad!! Could this possibly work, after all this heartache?? Our GPS was positive we belonged on the other side of the street, both Google’s and Apple’s… but we were going to try this new keypad anyway. With trepidation we gently entered the code, and from inside the door we heard the faintest of clicks: it had worked!!!! Our long dark purgatory was over!!
And there was our room key on the desk, and incredibly the room key worked also, and inside there was a mattress to sleep on not ten feet away! Well, a European mattress, but we are not complaining. OMG it felt so good just to sit!
Triumphantly I pulled out the bottle of red wine I’d sneakily bought in the Malta airport while we were trying to sort out luggage: this day could still end on a high note!
Then I looked for a corkscrew….. 😂😂😂
This just wasn’t our day!!!
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