After my little beach walk in the morning, it was time to return to Faro Airport just a few hours after arriving there. And, I will admit that the planning element of all of this was a little sub-optimal. I had flown from Norwich to Faro as the Ryanair flight was very cheap and I noticed I could then fly from Faro to Warsaw with the last minute flight availability from my Wizz Air Multipass. I like Warsaw, as I might have mentioned, so my plan was to spend some time there.
That was until I saw the hotel prices, which have been becoming consistently high over recent months. Warsaw has clearly worked out that I like it and is now attempting to monetise the emotional relationship. I then noticed that there was a flight from Warsaw to Bilbao, which is where I planned to spend a few days. So the new arrangement became Faro to Warsaw, then Warsaw to Bilbao, which looked perfectly sensible on a screen and slightly less sensible when exposed to time, distance and human comfort. Anyway, travel is about the journey and not the destination.
So the issue was that I had managed to not really think through the fact that the flight from Faro to Warsaw was four hours in length and then I discovered that the seating Gods had given me a middle seat. This flight was looking a little less appealing, especially as I knew that I was flying back to Spain the next day.
This is where rail ticketing needs to improve across countries, it’s just too expensive at the moment and I ideally like to use trains. But it was going to cost me £18 to get from Faro to Bilbao (via Warsaw) which also gave me two lounge accesses. Google informed me that to get from Faro to Bilbao by rail required six trains, would take over 28 hours and would cost somewhere around £150.
Security at Faro was efficient from a staffing perspective, but I was slightly inwardly annoyed that the passenger in front of me didn’t know that liquids needed to go in their own bag. This has been the rule for over a decade so perhaps I should be fair. There then followed five minutes while she located her various liquids spread across three bags, as though she had prepared a small toiletries treasure hunt for the benefit of airport security. I remained outwardly calm, which is one of my lesser-known heroic qualities.
Anyway, after that, I got to turn right at the above sign for the first time, which means that I was heading from the Schengen area. Last time I went left and was faced with long queues due to border control requirements.
I could see the non-Schengen area and the queues didn’t actually look too bad, although I still preferred the Schengen option of not needing to show a passport.
I then popped to the lounge, but I wittered on about that separately.
There were plenty of seats in the terminal, there were numerous power points and it all felt relaxed.
We were departing from Gate 220 and the whole process was well managed and it was clear where the priority and non-priority passengers needed to wait. The staff here seemed rather laid-back and I noticed that they weren’t checking bag sizes.
The boarding process was all well managed and we weren’t in the extreme Portuguese heat for long. Did I mention that it was too hot? The aircraft was 9H-WDX which I’ve been on twice before, although as it’s part of their Polish fleet, that’s perhaps not entirely unsurprising. The crew were Polish and were impeccable in terms of their friendliness during the flight.
The middle seat arrangement isn’t ideal, but wasn’t problematic and I managed to combine sleeping with watching YouTube videos to make the time go a little quicker. The aircraft was clean, the pilots were professional and we arrived into Warsaw a few minutes ahead of schedule.
Oh good, a packed bus from the aircraft to the airport. Although I was a little time restricted as I needed to cross Warsaw, I knew that there was no border control and so I would be able to get on the train quickly enough. That transpired to be true, it took eight minutes from getting to the terminal to getting on the train, which included buying a ticket from the machine.
Overall, this flight cost me £9 and everything went as expected, so I was pleased with the whole arrangement. It’s rare that I get the middle seat allocated and the flight was relatively full, but there are worse things that can happen. Once again, I thought that Wizz Air’s operation was all well managed and I was delighted to be back in Warsaw, even if just for one night. It might not have been the most logical routing, but it was cheap, efficient and let me continue my little adventure.