After an emotional goodbye-party, time had come to pack my shit and get on my way. The day was packed with ice cream, and an unpleasant reunion with our landlord, Mr. Azoulay who tried to rip us for 700€.
My two bags, carry-on backpack, my bike and an extra little backpack on the side was sufficiently heavy for me to request some help from Henry to get to the train station. When there, I promptly denied all his attempts to come with me on the train and to help me to the airport. How I regret that decision.
With my backpack on my back, my biggest bag hanging over that again, my other bag hanging of my neck and my bike and backpack #2 in hand I started walking from the airport train station towards the airport. Positivity quickly faded into despair as the meters went along. My biggest bag wasn’t really firmly sitting in one place but dragging me a little to the left, while my other bag was dangling on the other side while I was desperately trying to steer my bike in the correct direction without the front wheel suddenly changing direction leading to sudden stops.
After 200 meters I had to stop, tired out of my mind with day nightmares about missing the flight. Of course I hadn’t too much time before they would close check-in.
At my third break, about 800 meters from the station, my pulse was about 90% of max, I’d sweated about 10 liters and I couldn’t remember ever being this tired. Luckily, I was over half way to the airport, so a little hope remained.
70 meters from the entrance to the airport I had to resign. There was no way I could carry on with everything, I had to leave something behind. I locked my bike with one of the backpacks, and continued. The lightened load was still heavy enough, and everything about me must’ve been screaming of exhaustiveness as I dragged by legs one meter at the time through Terminal 1.
Norwegian was of course placed in the far end of the terminal. I reached the check-in 5 minutes before time, and I begged them to let me go back for my bike. They looked at me with strange eyes, I suspect that I might’ve been the most tired person they had ever seen before. Without any real energy left, I still managed to run all the way to my bike and get back without spending too much time.
Alors, I had to pack my bike into the bike bag. Unfortunately I forgot all the tools for dismantling it, so with the bike in it, so the procedure was tiresome. While packing the bike, the good girls in the check-in decided to weigh my carry-on luggage. Apparently 16 kg is too much for carry-on, and the bottle of rum inside could of course not go through security.
Unsuccessfully I tried to donate the rum bottle to them, and I had to pay to check in the carry on as normal luggage.
To do this I had to go to another clerk. This guy spent 200 million years finding out how much I needed to pay, and my watch showed about-fucking-time-to-be-through-security. With my bike bag I was running towards the over-sized luggage. The bag was slowly opening because of my poor packing, so I was afraid they wouldn’t let it on.
Fortunately they did, I got through security and this story ends with a disappointing anti-climax with me reaching the boarding in very good time.