John Edward Cooper’s Notes
Monday 16 May 2022
|
[2022] 01:00 “L—” 06:00–12:10 Leeds Bradford–Heraklion Jet2 LS443 Mediterraneo Hotel, Λιμένας Χερσόνησου, Crete Janet wrote: “I was up at 11pm [still on Sunday 15 May 2022, actually] after some sleep.”… L— arrived in his roomy Mercedes Benz car at the agreed 1am. “It was raining and quite cool,” Janet recalls. “We were at Leeds Bradford [airport] at 2.30am.” We were deposited within the curve of the airport buildings. I was aware that the Jet2 check-in hall was the one to our right (left in the diagram), but we couldn’t immediately get in, because the queue of waiting passengers extended as far as the road.  It wasn’t long, though, before we made it through the door, to be led here and there, and back and forth, along stanchion-and-belt barriers. 
Monday 16 May 2022 02:40:56 Long queue for baggage drop in Check-in Hall B 
Monday 16 May 2022 02:46:16 Long queue for baggage drop in Check-in Hall B 
Monday 16 May 2022 02:47:36 Long queue for baggage drop in Check-in Hall B 
Monday 16 May 2022 02:47:36 (detail 1) Long queue for baggage drop in Check-in Hall B 
Monday 16 May 2022 02:47:36 (detail 2) Long queue for baggage drop in Check-in Hall B Unaccountably, we were all directed to snake around slowly to the staffed check-in desks, while the self-service automated check-in kiosks were cordoned off. Then sometime later, others, who came after us, were allowed into that area and got their baggage dropped off before we did. We’d arrived at 2.30am, three hours before the gate for our flight was scheduled to close, but an hour of that was lost waiting to get shut of our hold luggage. Then it was dismaying to find that the queue for Security extended through the long corridor almost all the way to Check-in Hall B. 
Monday 16 May 2022 03:38:34 Extremely long queue for Security, ending just outside Check-in Hall B 
Monday 16 May 2022 03:38:34 (detail) Extremely long queue for Security At the end of the corridor was a wider area, divided into two ways: to the right, the narrower “fast track” lane; and to the left, the way for most people to Security, broader overall but with several stanchion-and-belt barriers to herd the crowds to the right, to the left, to the right again, etc., etc. Although we hadn’t been able to book “fast track”, plenty of people evidently had been able. “Fast track” is a misnomer, though: it should perhaps be “somewhat less slow than the other, extremely slow track”. 
Monday 16 May 2022 04:13:20 Extremely long queue for Security… 
Monday 16 May 2022 04:13:20 (detail) …forced to go to and fro, to and fro around stanchion-and-belt barriers I thought that then we’d enter the Security area; but no, we passed through a doorway to a long corridor, with more stanchion-and-belt barriers herding us like cattle, to, fro, and to again. At this point, with only 40 minutes till the boarding gate’s scheduled 05:30 closure, I despaired of making it to our flight. On the way, L— had told us tales of missed flights, including one of his own. I declared that I would never fly again! I didn’t quite swear to that, though I used plenty of “oaths” in the other sense of the word. 
Monday 16 May 2022 04:52:02 Further toing and froing around stanchion-and-belt barriers To add insult to injury, when we entered the Security area itself: yet more stanchions and belts to get around! The security process, when one finally — finally! — got to participate in it, was quick and straightforward. Afterwards, when I’d scooped computers etc. back into my rucksack, we hurried off to find our flight. I didn’t have time to put on again my jacket, belt, watch and rings, which I’d stuffed into the rucksack before I’d passed through the scanner. We were thirsty and had planned to refresh ourselves at a café once we were air-side, but there was no time for that now. 
I sorely wanted to kick over the perfume and booze stacks in the duty-free shopping “maze”. Then we misread the gate number and went the wrong way; but anyway, realising our mistake, we hurried in the opposite direction, and found a fairly substantial queue of people still waiting to board Flight LS443. Then I couldn’t find my passport and boarding pass, which made me panic and panic, as we broke out of the queue to rummage through my things. That I could find my boarding pass for the return flight, seemed a cruel mockery.  Needless to say, we did find them,—    Boarding passes for the outward flight —and proceeded along the movable boarding bridge into the aircraft. We were both showing signs of distress, for one of the cabin crew members reacted in a consoling fashion to us. She was able to give us water to drink, so that helped. “The plane… was held back to get everyone on board,” Janet wrote. “If we’d known that earlier, we wouldn’t have got ourselves into such a state.” Because we occupied front seats, there was no overhead storage just there, so I had to wait for other passengers to board before I could stow our carry-on luggage above the seat behind. Even then, we were still waiting for one or two delayed passengers. After that, the captain came on the loudspeaker to acknowledge the cause of the delay, saying that we were now only waiting for the go-ahead from air traffic control, and estimating that the flight would be of 3 hours 49 minutes’ duration. The aeroplane started to taxi at 6.46am, and actually took off at 6.58am, i.e. almost an hour late. So I calculated that that would make our landing time 10:47 BST or 12:47 EEST, i.e. 37 minutes late. When the trolley came past, we both bought a bottle of sparkling Harrogate water. Because there were no seats in front of us, with hinged, pull-down little tables, the cabin staff supplied us each with a table with a metal arm that plugged into the left arm-rest of the seat. The only drawback of sitting there, was that people would queue for the toilet and sometimes encroach on our extra-legroom space. One was not required to wear a face-mask, either in the airport or on the aeroplane, so no-one did. Later in the journey, perhaps during the final taxiing, it was announced that the requirement to wear a mask in the airport in Crete had just now been lifted. No-one occupied the window seat in our three-seat row, so Janet did, making more room for both of us.… Ca.12 o’clock (EEST) I became aware of a lot of irregular coastlines, inlets and islands. “This bespeaks a very troubled geological past,” I commented in a deliberately stilted manner. When Santorini was mentioned as the last island of any size that we would pass over before arriving at Heraklion airport, I figured that the “ɔ”-shaped island with an islet in the gap, must be it — evidently a caldera remnant (which rather confirmed my earlier statement). I don’t know what I was expecting but, as we were descending, the landscape that presented itself beyond the watery foreground seemed surprisingly mountainous. And then the model roads and tiny toy cars rapidly became real and we were touching down. We landed at 12.43pm, so only 33 minutes late. As soon as the “Fasten seat belts” lights went out, I sprang up and retrieved our hand-luggage before the occupants of the seats below would get up and block the aisle. So we were the first off and down the ladder, on this welcomely hot and sunny day — and first on the shuttle bus to the terminal, so we got seats. “Yes — our passports were stamped!” Janet wrote. We hadn’t received any stamps till now: not in Dubrovnik, nor in Geneva. I wasn’t as happy to do so as she seemingly was, for it signalled to me that we were now foreigners and no longer EU citizens. Perhaps I’m mistaken, though; perhaps everyone, EU citizen or no, would have received a stamp.  “Should one of us go out and find the Mercury representative?” I wondered, given that the flight was late arriving. But no, we waited till we’d retrieved our cases from the carousel before heading to the exit. There were several people carrying cards and other means of displaying names, but no-one with “Mercury” or our names on them. Eventually, though, we did find a woman representing Mercury at a counter under the cover of the structure on the opposite side of the road. She gave us our “Welcome Pack”— 
Envelope  
“Welcome to Crete!” 
“Excursion Programm” [sic] —and handed us over to our driver, who took one of the suitcases (I wheeled the other one) and led us off to a car park where his Mercedes Benz “ΤΑΞΙ” was parked. This was the second “Mercedes” we’d been in today, therefore. I was looking for distinctively Greek letters on the registration plates of the vehicles we passed, but I saw none; I only saw letters occurring in the same form (though not always having the same phonetic value, e.g. “X”, “H”, “P”) in both Greek and Latin alphabets. The 16-mile journey to the Mediterraneo Hotel took less than ½-hour. The ramp up which we wheeled our cases at the hotel entrance (“4” on the illustration of the hotel, below) was a bit troublesome because it had ridges in which the wheels caught. We checked in at Reception. On Mercury’s “Confirmation Invoice” it had stated—
—so the charge of €27 was less than I expected. We accompanied a porter, who took our cases, to our room: out of a side exit to the left of Reception, across a road and into the building marked “7”, along a corridor, up in a lift to the floor above (we’d subsequently use stairs if we went this way), out of the building with a left turn, then with a right turn up a couple of flights of stairs, and with a left turn along the external passage to the third, first-floor room (Room 530, partially covered by an “L” on the illustration, below). I say “first floor”, because there were rooms on the “ground floor” below; but because of the slope and landscaping of the terrain the passage was at ground level). The key that opened the door was a real, metal one. It had a rectangle of plastic attached to it that fitted in a slot by the door to activate the room’s electricity supply.
Janet commented that the room was “Fine”, adding what I take to be the reasons for this: that it had a “walk-in shower” and a “balcony overlooking the sea”. There was a safe in the built-in wardrobe with an open door, but no key, so we went to get one. Use of the safe was €2 a day or €10 a week, but she let us have the key for €10 for the whole of our stay.
We went to the restaurant (“14”, below) for lunch. Because the requirement to wear face-coverings in Greece had just been relaxed, we assumed that this also applied to taking meals in the hotel, but it didn’t. However, as it was getting towards the end of the lunch period so there weren’t that many people around, they let us in without face-coverings.
Janet was pleased to note that it was “all buffet meals”, and added that “because we have ‘all inclusive’, drinks (most) are included. After that we returned to our room and I unpacked.” My own unpacking consisted of not much more than setting up computers on the dressing table, adding keyboard and mouse, power supplies,
etc., from the opened suitcases. I’d not shaved since yesterday, so I did that, using the shaver socket below the hair-dryer in the bathroom. Although I was able to prop up my magnifying mirror nearby, I couldn’t see much in the dim bathroom light, so had to make do with how the skin felt with the hands not how it looked with the eyes.
|
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]