The Dreaded Travel Day, or Zen and the Art of Waiting

 March 5 to 6, 2026


I alway tell myself and others that I like flying and I like airports. These are mainly lies that I must perpetuate or I’d never go anywhere. From people’s descriptions of their own discomforts, I may suffer less than most, which is partly due to the advantage of having a small body stuffed into the space we’re allowed for a 9+ hour flight. However, in truth, it’s miserable. But it’s the price to pay.

I met Bettyanne at the Port Wash dock to meet our 8 am float plane to YVR. The plane was late, and we were cold, but comforted ourselves with thoughts that this would be the last of being cold for a while. We’d be proven wrong, but it’s the delusions of the present that get you through, not the realities that strike you later. 

First flight of the day, just us & the pilot

Anyhow, flying across the Strait of Georgia is elating, and it was a beautiful morning, despite the bluster outside. The shuttle to take us from the float plane terminal to the main terminal comes every 40 minutes, and we’d just missed one, being that our plane had been late. We hung out in Seair’s little office, the first wait of a long day of waiting.

YVR was easy. We were checked in and had our boarding passes on our phones before we even got there. We printed copies of those at a kiosk just for back-up, and whizzed through security, where there were no line-ups. Something new this time: no need to separate liquids or electronics. Like last year in Frankfurt, we just threw everything in the bins and walked through. There are these new scanners that look like a cross between an MRI machine and a rocket module, and everything goes through there. I didn’t see anyone monitoring, but maybe I just missed that. Bettyanne’s stuff got flagged; turned out she had missed unloading a small metal weight she carries around in her backpack as part of her strength-building regime. I guess that regime is now following her in her travels. 

Then, a 4 hour wait in YVR, hum de hum hum, then 9+ hours on the plane, dum de dum dum, then a 5 hour wait in CDG (Paris) for the last leg to Marrakech, then a quick 3h 20 m flight (when I finally slept) to get here. Leaving Pender around 8 am and arriving in Marrakech at 3:20 pm meant 22 hours and 20 minutes of travel time in total, almost half of it spent just waiting. As Bettyanne pointed out, we islanders get good at this, because we’re always waiting for ferries. It becomes a part of the rhythm of life. Oh, yes, we do get fed up. It’s not all zen.

 

Marrakech!

We were greeted by our driver, who waited with a sign in a line of dozens of other drivers waiting with signs. It took us two rounds and then asking someone before we finally found him. This was my first full realization that our adventure is far from unique. You'd think I'd have known that.

The city walls from the window of our car

 

Traffic was crazy, but our driver was deft, and he brought us to a ragtag intersection where he handed us off to a man with a hand cart. Into the cart went the bags and we followed behind, all the way to Riad Naya, our accommodations in the heart of the medina. All this transportation was arranged and provided by the riad for a small fee. We were greeted by Mustafa, with whom I’d been communicating for months via Booking.com. He gave us sweet Moroccan tea and a map of the medina, and got us settled into our room. 

Riads are everywhere in the Marrakech medina. They are the one-time homes of wealthy merchants, now converted into guest houses. Rooms are arranged around a central courtyard, usually with a small pool in the center. Our riad has six or eight rooms only. It’s very simple as tourist riads go, but has all the characteristic woodwork and carved doorways of any very old building here. From the outside, it’s almost forbidding, on a small lane, through a low archway-cum-hole-in-the-wall, but inside, it’s an oasis. Walking along the side lanes of the medina, I was able to peek into a couple of private homes, and they were just like this: a carved doorway into a beautiful, serene space.

The way through to our riad is meant to discourage, I dunno, everyone? But then...

...things start to improve...

 

 

... and we find ourselves in a beautiful space. That door up behind us is our room

And this is the view looking down from our doorway.

We went for dinner at one of the two restaurants recommended by our host. This one was an open-air right on Jemaa el Fna, the mega-square here. We each had a lamb tagine that was more than acceptable though not spectacular, for less than $12 for the two of us. We sat next to two English women who ate panini and chips. Looking down the row from us, every table was being served panini and chips. I wonder if these people knew where they were. But that’s just me. Note that it was still daylight, and it being Ramadan, most of the population is fasting until dusk.

Cold us, hot tagine, Jemaa el Fna behind us.

We were starting to feel a chill in the air when we sat down for dinner. By the time our bill came, an eternity later, we were freezing, despite wearing our puffy coats. So much for the hoped-for warmth of spring in Morocco! 

We ended the day with a stroll about Jemaa el Fna as it was coming to life at the end of a Ramadan day. Then to bed for a very long sleep.  

Good night, Marrakech