Whilst I prefer travelling from London City these days, this adventure would be starting off from London Heathrow which works out best as an Uber ride from South Ruislip. There is the option of using the underground, but that requires a journey into London to then switch to the correct branch, and that’s considerably slower. Uber, for the most part, works out as a balance between time and cost.
I’d pre-booked the taxi for 07:45 to get us to Terminal 3. Our intended arrival time being during rush hour meant that giving ourselves the best part of an hour to get there would be a good idea. I did notice the app suggested we’d need to be at the airport three hours before, it seemingly was not able to distinguish that this was a short haul flight where bag drop only opens two hours before.
The journey was faster than we expected, aided by the driver cutting up other drivers and having no mercy in the rush hour traffic. It was an experience for sure. For £57.96, a thirty minute journey may sound expensive, but £7 of that is what the airport charges for drop-offs. Considering the current climate, with fuel prices soaring due to the conflict in Western Asia, it's a wonder it wasn't higher.
The bag drop and security was easy enough after being sent through to the empty fast track queue. Not needing to empty bags made this quicker, and this left us with plenty of time to find somewhere to buy some lunch for later. A WH Smiths meal deal seemed like the best option there, and once ready we waited patiently for our flight. I was still hungry though, so had a bacon cob whilst we waited.
To our surprise, the gate we were assigned was the same we’d flown to Valencia from several months ago. Everything went surprisingly smoothly and fast, and we were seated on the plane by 10:05. The flight to Prague is under two hours, which meant we’d got most of the afternoon Ito settle in. When booking accommodation and flights, we'd forgotten that for this race series, Prague is the odd one out with the event taking place on the Saturday. This meant we'd got until 20:00 to not just arrive and check-in to the AirBNB, but to also get to the Expo for our number collection. Any big delays in the flight could be catastrophic. The flight did however land five minutes early. To quote a famous supermarket advert, “every little helps.” So far, everything seemed to be going much better than I anticipated. Until we reached the border.
The new European Entry Exit System was in place, but the machines didn’t work for me, even though they did for Carmen. We also couldn’t join the queue for the border control to start with as they’d put a barrier across, and we had to queue on the other side of that. It seemed a little confusing. Every moment that was wasted here would be a delay in getting our race number.
There were two people, looking like they were in their late teens or easily twenties, who decided not to queue for long and tried jumping the entire queue, right in front of the immigration police office. When they got near the front it looked like they may have been turned back, and then they hung around near the office and eventually ducked under the barrier to join the queue - skipping about an hour's worth of queueing as a result. Nobody said anything to them, but every time they turned around, I glared at them with that ‘I know what you did, I’m annoyed, and I’m silently judging you’ look that British people tend to be very good at. Over an hour after deplaning we were through security to collect our bags.
Unlike many European cities, there’s no train or metro link from the airport to the city. This leaves you with three options: taxi, airport shuttle, or a regular bus. A month ago, the shuttle put their prices up, which means in some circumstances it’s now cheaper to take a taxi than the shuttle; but we’d already planned on taking the bus. We could take the 59 bus to Nádraží Veleslavín, and from there switch to the underground as far as Staroměstská in Prague 1: the old town.
Sometime between 2027 and 2030 they plan on opening a railway station at Václav Havel Airport, so that may make such a journey simpler in the near future. For now, the bus and metro works well enough.
It was then only a short walk from the metro stop to the AirBNB where we could meet our host, and pay the 50 CZK pp/pd tourist tax in cash. It felt more like a hotel than an AirBNB since it even had a reception. We quickly got sorted, and then headed out to catch the number 17 tram to Výstaviště, and from there we walked to the Křižíkovy pavilony to collect our race numbers.
The pavilion had plenty of amusements around, but we followed the signs around the back of the pavilion to where we saw the front of the queue. We followed it along one whole side of the pavilion, up some steps and back around to the front where we’d originally got off the tram. We’d not spotted the end of the queue when we arrived, otherwise we’d have saved ourselves some time.
From 14:55 we queued to get our race numbers, whilst the sun dropped below the horizon and the temperature dropped. I realised quickly that I should have brought a coat out with me. I was so cold. Even this queue was subject to people pushing in ahead of people that had been queueing for ages.
Once inside it was a bit of a free-for-all, passing people selling running kit, and then the Super Half booth, and then other stands advertising other European races. Had we got our numbers already we’d have been more inclined to linger. Instead we found the next queue, and joined that as it then splintered out into multiple queues segregated by gender. I assumed people were being let inside in waves due to fire safety standards for the number of people allowed inside at any one time.
As I finally put my hand on my race number, it had just turned 18:30. Over ninety minutes to get our race number, and from later accounts that was far from the worst. There were people that queued over two hours, some not getting in until after 22:00 - two hours after the expo should have closed. Eventually people were being turned away and told to collect their number from the race village in the early hours of the following morning.
We wanted to get back to the apartment quickly, to get somewhere warmer, but we stopped to get our SuperHalf passports stamped, and get the now traditional photo at the SuperHalf sign. It took us maybe twenty minutes to look around and get out, and pass the queue that was now even longer than it had been when we joined it. Surely there must have been a better way.
Back on the tram, we took it back to where we’d started, and walked to Tesco to get some supplies - garlic bread, and two types of tortellini (pork and beef, and the other spinach and ricotta) with a sauce for tonight, and then what we’d need for breakfast tomorrow. It was dark, and cold, so we rushed back to the AirBNB to get cooking.
We’d not checked the cooking facilities thoroughly at the AirBNB before heading out, and didn’t realise that it didn’t have an oven. With no other way to cook garlic bread, we improvised by using the frying pan to toast the garlic bread, whilst the rest of the food slowly cooked in a pan. I’d got a pecan pastry for dessert, and was in bed by 22:15. It was feeling a little warm though, but hopefully we’d both sleep well.