Why I Hate Flying

Today marks the beginning of what I call “the home stretch” – our last five weeks in Europe before going home for Christmas!  We are heading to Turkey & Greece to finish off, but first we must fly to Stuttgart, Germany to spend three nights in the “cradle of the automobile.”  I’ll never understand the way flights are priced, but it was much cheaper to fly from Budapest to Stuttgart then Stuttgart to Istanbul than to fly from Budapest to Istanbul directly, which is retarded because Istanbul is southeast from Budapest and Stuttgart is west so we’re basically going backwards then forwards!

Our flight today was not until 5 pm, but since we had to check out of the hotel at noon, we decided to just head to the airport and kill a few hours there instead of wandering around with our backpacks.  Had I known how small the Budapest Ferihegy International Airport is, though, I would have opted to eat lunch somewhere around the hotel before going to the airport because the options there were pathetic and overpriced.  If you’re ever flying in or out of Hungary, be forewarned that the Ferihegy is the largest of the country’s five airports, but it’s the smallest airport I’ve been to and there’s only a handful of places to eat, with only one place serving hot food (although there is a second terminal about 2 km away that we didn’t go to).  Terminal 1 is so small, in fact, that there aren’t even check-in counters for each airline – they share counters so you can only check in 3 hours before your flight when your appropriate airline has taken over a section of counters.

This was our first time flying with German Wings, a low-cost airline similar to Ryan Air.  Everyone harps about how Ryan Air is so strict about carry-on luggage, but today’s experience with German Wings was ten times worse than anytime we’ve taken Ryan Air!  At the check-in counter, they made everyone place their bag (even if it’s just a purse!) on the conveyor belt scale (the one you put your checked luggage on normally) and if you’re under the 8kg limit, they tag your bag as carry-on approved.  With our backpacks, the lady at the check-in counter also asked us to put them in the size checker.  My backpack, the Osprey Aura 35, is fairly small as far as backpacks go, but it has a curved backpanel for ventilation which makes it fit awkwardly into the size checker.  Because I couldn’t slide it in and out of the size checker easily, the check-in lady said it was too big for cabin baggage at first.  But, after a bit of rough shoving and yanking by Paul (accompanied by us snapping at each other) showing that the bag does fit in the checker, she said “ok, it’s too big but it’s ok” and finished checking us in, letting me keep my bag with me but not giving me an approved tag.

Paranoid that we’d get checked again at boarding and maybe have to go back and check my bag (which costs an extra 20 euro and would be a huge hassle), I pulled almost everything out of my bag and tried to re-pack it better once we went through security.  We managed to transfer a bit more stuff to Paul’s bag, but the shape of my bag just doesn’t make it possible to slide it in and out of the size checker easily!  Between the hassle of worrying about the weight and size of your carry-on baggage and the hassle of going through airport security, flying as a method of transport is, for me, the worst possible option.  I’d rather take a bus, train or boat any day, but unfortunately the train ride to Istanbul would have been ridiculously long (over 30 hours) and bus and boat aren’t even an option.  Thankfully, they didn’t check our bags when we boarded and we got through this flight without any further hic-ups.

We fly again on Friday to get from Stuttgart to Istanbul, and I’m not looking forward to the fight that will surely accompany our next packing blitz.  We fight every time we pack about how much stuff we have because I’m a hoarder and Paul doesn’t get the fact that living off a 35-litre backpack with about 11kg of stuff for 9 months is as small as it’s gonna get!  To get down to the 8kg weight limit we already put a lot of stuff in our pockets (it’s hilarious because we look pregnant in a lumpy sort of way) and I don’t know what else I can take out of my bag so we don’t run into problems on Friday.  I guess that Thursday night I’ll have to get creative…