Tags
gothenburg, holidays, parents, plane travel, stopover flights, train travel, transport woes, transportation, travel, vacation, vienna
I am planning to ‘import’ my parents to Sweden for 7-10 days at the end of July. We have already booked a cottage on an island by the West Coast for a week, and my parents are going to stay in Gothenburg for another few days and do touristy stuff. It is my birthday during this time as well, so it will be really nice to be able to spend it with my family rather than sitting there on my own with a one-person birthday cake and a bottle of wine 🙂
Today, my dad phoned me and told me that he had been looking for flights to Gothenburg to come visit (both me and my parents have already flown that route, so why wouldn’t it exist anymore) and the travel agency had only shown him some strange stopover flights with departure at 6.25 am.
I shook my head at the cluelessness of the travel agent, told my dad that I would find the correct flight for him, checked the Austrian Airlines site and was greeted with the message – “From June 1st, we no longer operate our route to Gothenburg“. Oops…
Vienna, Inner City. (Thinking about it, horse carriage could be a fun alternative transport option)
I checked the SAS website, who suggested a route via Frankfurt. Lufthansa want people to go via Munich (2 hour stopover), Air Berlin via Berlin (2 hour stopover), and Norwegian via Oslo (with an overnight stay). None of which is a particularly fun way to travel the 1000km which should take under 2 hours end-to-end…
Copenhagen is only 3-4 hours by train from Gbg, so we started checking flights to Copenhagen instead. Turns out there is only a single remaining flight operator serving a direct route from Vienna to Copenhagen (Austrian Airlines, and the only flight viable to get to Gbg at a reasonable hour leaves at 7 am *gulp*).
I don’t get it. There is all this talk about the world getting smaller, transport faster… and yet it seems like there are less and less ways to get around within Europe!
At the end of the conversation, train travel actually started to seem like a fun idea (you can get from Vienna to Gothenburg in 18 hours via sleeper train and connecting train – if you’re going to be travelling slow, might as well do it properly!), and I am actually seriously starting to consider this option for my next trip back home! Could be fun – train, iPod, a good book, the world running by outside…
Post-London-Life lesson learned: don’t take transport connections for granted!
