I’m writing this on Friday evening and on Monday morning (extremely early, Monday morning), we’re going to Aberdeen Airport to catch a plane to Amsterdam before (hopefully) catching another plane to Paris.
The past few trips I’ve taken, it feels like I’ve handed over the reins to Stuart, who has handled all the bookings, etc and just asked for money when necessary and while I have travelled without Stuart, it’s mostly been solo travelling – without anyone else to worry about – if things go wrong when solo, there feels like there’s a lot less at stake. Because, you just get yourself out of it, right? You have no other choice.
That’s not to say all travels with Stuart have been plain sailing – looking at you, Arras 2015.
This trip, I’m going with Connor. Who hasn’t been to Paris before. I’ve booked everything, from flights to hotels and everything in-between and the closer things get, the more I’m starting to wonder if (what’s meant to be) the 55 minute transfer time in Amsterdam is going to be enough – KLM offered it up as an option while booking a flight from Aberdeen to Paris, so you have to assume it is… But what if the Aberdeen flight is late? Looking up the gate A08 at Schiphol that the Aberdeen flight seems to land at, the internet tells me it’s a bus gate, which I assume means we’ll have to get off the plane and onto a bus to be driven to the terminal building. Fine, in normal circumstances, but thinking about Gatwick and how long buses can take to show up sometimes, will that factor into the time we have?
I downloaded the Schiphol app yesterday, and tracked KL2003 – the flight we’re taking from Amsterdam to Paris. I got a notification that it started boarding at 8:50am. The Aberdeen flight landed at 8:40.
We’re only taking hand-luggage. So that takes some of the worry away. We only need to get ourselves (and our backpacks) from plane to plane.
Plane schedules aside, there’s also the mess of Covid rules. My first encounter of them, at all, really. The only other place I’ve been since March 2020 is London in September 2021 and at that point, while masks were mandatory, there was no testing or anything required. No forms to fill in. In fact, throughout both outbound and inbound travel, not a single document of mine was checked at all (other than self-scanning my boarding pass).
Now I need to deal with Passenger locator forms, etc. As far as I’m aware (and I’ve checked multiple times) we don’t need to test to get into France, which is great. But Leanne joked that if we missed the flight to Paris from Amsterdam, we could chill in Amsterdam for a bit. But we can’t do that, because if I’m right, to get into the Netherlands, you do need to have tested negative – not that I plan to be positive going to Paris, but France don’t care anymore, it seems.
Stress aside, the main reason for the trip is to be at Disneyland Paris for it’s 30th anniversary. My first trip in 2007 was in it’s 15th Anniversary year and I’ve been in the parks during it’s 15th, 20th, 25th and with this upcoming trip, the 30th anniversaries, though this is the first time I’ll be there on the actual date it originally opened (April 12th).
I don’t know (and don’t think) anything is officially happening to celebrate the anniversary on the day, but it’ll still be cool to be there and just be back in a Disney park in general. We’ve got 2 nights/3 days at Disney and then a couple days for Paris itself. There are things I need to book if we’re going to do them in Paris, but I’m waiting until we’re actually over there to attempt any of that, in case anything goes wrong beforehand.
Fingers crossed we don’t end up in Arras again.
No offence, Arras.