What's in a letter 'k'?

 

The following post may require a trigger warning for anyone who finds travel timings to be stressful. Cro used to tell me a former partner was so lackadaisical about turning up in time for trains and planes that it was torture to travel with him. 

But Mary and I are moderate creatures, neither too paranoid nor too slack with margins of error so we had left with a reasonable amount of wiggle-room to get the efficient Belgrade city buses that would zoom us from the 'Hotel Serbia' to the Nikolai Tesla airport (and hands up those who didn't know he was the most famous Serbian in the world, even more than Gavrilo Princip)

We caught the first bus, the zippy number 17 and waited at the interchange for the 493 that would take us to the centre. It came a bit earlier than the board said, and it had 493k on it, but what difference could that make? Quite a lot as it turned out.

Our bus went towards the centre then didn't cross the bridge over the Sava but turned right. A diversion perhaps? When Google Maps showed we had passed the interchange again I felt it was time to ask the driver. With the best English he had (which was *much* better than my Serbian), he explained that the next stop was 20 minutes down the motorway we were on. Ulp!

I googled and it turns out the 493 is a long distance free commuter bus that starts about 50 miles from Belgrade centre, and the 493k is a special one that doesn't go to the actual centre but just loops back from our side of the Sava. So as we hurtled South into the mountains, we started to get a bit antsy. We were in full countryside and heading to places like Bulgaria and Romania.

The bus hurtled on and we made calculations and promises to deities that could let us catch the flight. The first stop was at Mali Pozarevac (go on, check it on the map), nearly 40km south of Belgrade where we hopped off and luckily caught a northbound bus straight away, but we did it so quickly we didn't know what number it was. But luckily again, Mary asked a fellow passenger who was able to tell us and then to warn us to get off when we got back to the Sava bridge (where there is a labyrinthine interchange called Mostar, that she even led us through, and may she have her reward on earth and in heaven)

The final save was that Mary spotted a taxi that was available and had got out some extra unnecessary dinars that turned out to be necessary, so we got a taxi all the way to the airport. 

We were sitting in departures more than an hour before the flight, but I think it was only on the plane that my heartbeat returned to normal.