Message sent to the Kiwix team after returning from the Hackathon in Montreuil:
I am writing this report from my bed.
On my return trip I had a nice walk from the Republic square to Montmartre to Gare La Plaine Stade de France only to learn that that station was closed for the weekend, which was an unpleasant surprise since I started running short on time. Fortunately, the employees told me that I can go to the nearby station of line D (Stade de France–Saint-Denis) and take a bus from there. The bus turned out to be free (as a replacement for paid railway tickets that were rendered useless by the temporary closure of the station; but as I hadn’t bought a ticket beforehand, I unjustly benefitted from such measure by the railway operator 🤷). In the bus I monitored progress on the map and was quite reassured by the routing app which estimated the arrival time to be within safe limits. I was wrong! The bus indeed reached the territory of the Charles de Gaulle airport at the estimated time but kept wandering in the maze of the airport road network and eventually took me to the wrong terminal. At the location there were only directions for different sections of that terminal but no indication how one can get to another terminal. I lost several minutes trying to spot directions myself and eventually had to ask an employee. Keeping long story short, I managed to get to terminal 1, arrive at my gate and pass security check before boarding started.
The plane took off and landed in Vienna on time. I had a layover of more than 4 hours and went to see Vienna, too. I was about to return to the airport dangerously late, so I adjusted my route but still missed the train by a minute (I heard it leaving) and had to wait for the next one for half an hour. Luckily, the Vienna airport was almost empty at such moderately late time (21:00), hence it took me only a few minutes to pass the security check and passport control.
Overall, it was an adventurous day with a happy end!