Marseille - Planes and Alarm Clocks

We made a quick side trip to Marseilles in order to catch a Ryan Air flight to Porto as our time in Europe was ticking away and we had still not covered Portugal, Spain and France. We caught a train to Marseilles from Nice and then caught another bus to the airport where we were staying at a Formula One hotel near the airport. We were booked onto an early morning flight so decided to prebook a taxi with the receptionist. We set our alarm and went to bed, after trying to interpret Temptation Island -France, which was being played on the one channel that our t.v could pick up.

The next thing we knew, there was a bang on our door with the receptionist asking in broken English whether we still wanted the taxi as it was waiting outside the hotel - our alarm had not worked and it was now 5.45am and our flight left in less than an hour, with Ryan Air closing its ticket booth in 20 minutes. We hurriedly threw on some clothes and zipped up our bags as we raced to the taxi, throwing some cash at the receptionist as we left. The taxi driver spoke little English but understood that we were in a hurry and put his foot to the pedal. We jumped out of the taxi leaving the driver a generous trip as we ran to the terminal. Thankfully, they were still processing passengers as we lined up to have our baggage weighed and were rushed through security to enable the flight to leave on time.

Unbeknown to us, RyanAir takes their commitment to arriving on time quite seriously - too seriously I might argue. On touchdown in Porto the captain announced that they were 4 minutes early and so played some interesting music that included an arrangement of trumpets that reminded us of the horse races, while the rest of the passengers broke out into spontaneous applause (more out of fright than appreciation; a version is available at http://www.gla.ac.uk/~woody/sounds/ryr-trumpet.amr but you may need to download real player to listen). Jez and I looked at each other in astonishment - we had entered the world of cheap European air travel and we were scared.