Paris is one of the most popular direct destinations from Dublin Airport. At the time of writing there are 58 weekly departures to CDG, 20 weekly departures to BVA, and 13 to ORY — collectively representing somewhere in the region of two thousand seats in each direction every day. That might just about have been tolerable if it included priority boarding, lounge access, and seat selection, but with none of these on offer I decided it was beyond what I was willing to pay.
After some contemplation I decided instead to do a long weekend in Germany. Within moments Google Flights popped up an extraordinarily cheap ticket between Dublin and Nuremberg with a twelve hour layover in the City of Light. This was too good of an opportunity to miss, even if it did mean a very long day. My morning started with a brutal am alarm call ahead of a am flight departure. This proved hopelessly optimistic in practice; my flight landed on schedule only to dump me at the back of a 55 minute queue for self-service passport control.
It could have been worse, mind; a European Union passport meant that I was in the faster moving of the two queues. The screen on the machine i got to had a popup warning telling me about a missing Windows Update, though fortunately this didn't preclude my border crossing.
Hertz had thoughtfully upgraded me to a MG4 EV, my first encounter with the type and my first experience renting an electric car. Hopefully this is something that will be figured out as the world moves away from combustion engine vehicles. Toutatis is a custom-designed Intamin LSM installation with three inversions, a swing launch, and m of track. The majority of the layout stays close to the ground, with only a top hat element standing significantly above the tree line, resulting in a ride that is both fast and furious.
I'd watched an on-board video ahead of time and it's fair to say that I was really looking forward to experiencing things for myself. The queue was signposted at thirty minutes, and this was more or less on the money. Load and dispatch procedures were as efficient as they could reasonably be, aided by assigned seating with a slight twist: a three way split at the station entrance allowed a choice between row 1, rows , or rows Though complex, this did seem to work fairly well, even if the enthusiast in me would have liked to have seen a dedicated back row queue rather than leaving a prime seat to the luck of the draw.
