We did quite a bit of planning for this trip, and we knew one of the trickiest parts would be flying into Chania on Crete. We wanted to do this to avoid either taking a ferry from Athens or driving 2.5hrs from Heraklion after a long flight. Where we ended up was a 5:30am flight from Amsterdam to Chania on an airline called TransAvia. Sketchy, I know. It was the only direct flight from Amsterdam to Chania that day, and there are actuality only three a week, Thursday, Saturday and Tuesday.
Fast forward to Wednesday morning and I finally get my phone working to receive a text that our flight to Chania has been cancelled. Once we got on email the message from TransAvia was even worse, "we recommend that you immediately make other plans as we will not be able to help you".
We made a quick decision and booked a flight on Lufthansa from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, and Frankfurt to Heraklion, with a tight layover in Frankfurt. All in all, we felt OK as we had been dreading the 3am wake-up that was going to come with a 5:30am flight, so the 11am to Frankfurt seemed pretty luxurious. Changing the car rental wasn't difficult, and the AirBNB was flexible on when we arrived so the only thing, we were really losing was some money (TransAvia < Lufthansa) and some time in Crete.
When we got to Shipol things got a little crazy. We arrived a healthy 2hrs before our flight and got our bags dropped relatively easily, though with a little confusion due to all the people in the terminal. It was only then we recognized our real problem. The security line started by heading outside the terminal. We walked a solid 400m away from the terminal before turning around and reaching a full stop. After moving slowly for 30min and looking at our watches to see that we had an hour and fifteen before our flight took off, we overhead an official tell another passenger that from where we were it was 1.5hrs from reaching security (not our gate). We were calm though. We are experienced travellers. Surely there was a system in place for this? Flights wouldn't be able to take off if everyone was late.
We did a quick internet search and saw that Dutch parliament was starting an investigation into security lines at Shipol due to the severity of the situation. Would have been good to know that a few days ahead of time.
Long story short. We head an airport employee asking people when their flights were. We flagged her down and she moved us through an expedite line. That combined with our flight being delayed 15min let us run to the gate and get on board just as they called our group.
We ended up making our connection in Frankfurt with a bit more running, though our bagged didn't. Since then, we've had a lovely couple of days in Crete. Our AirBNB host was cool about lettign us into our place at 11:30pm. We have new clothes that are cheap and awesome. We shared toothbrushes for a couple of days. Finally, our stuff showed up and we are good to go again.
It turns out that when you spend all day in a bathing suit you don't take many pictures. Lots of stuff is missing, like Graham and Emilie dominating at Surfing, but here are a few from our time in Crete so far.
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