The following article is from our November 2006 issue.

Traveling From A to B via C and D. A trans-European odyssey on low-cost flights. By Uwe Siemon-Netto

For decades, Germany and France have been the best of friends in the European Union. This does not mean that travel between these two neighboring nations comes cheap. Direct low-cost flights are scarce; the alternative involves detours via third and fourth countries and can go wrong. Sometimes, though, these odysseys end with amusing insights, as happened to our correspondent.

Now that I am approaching my three score plus 10 years, I am often reminded of Jean de la Fontaine's parable, "The Grasshopper and the Ant." The wisdom of his fabled hard-working and cautious ant was not part of my long career. I lived rather like the cricket that sang all summer. Consequently, I have to travel in the company of backpackers clapping their hands when their charter flight lands at its destination.

I made the acquaintance of this species at the height of the tourist season, when my wife and I had to rush to Berlin from our summer home in southwestern France. When that becomes necessary, forget snazzy airlines. Their regular fares for neighborly excursions within Europe would easily get you to New York and back.

Of course we could have driven or taken the train. There's even a bus line, but who fancies 1,000 miles on the autobahn with its 100-mile long traffic jams? I admire American septuagenarians still having the nerve for such an ordeal. Being a Euro-wimp, I opted for Ryanair, the preferred means of transportation of elderly crickets like us, or folks a third our age.

Now, here's the problem with Ryanair: It will take you from many a one-horse town in Germany or France and dump you in England for pocket change if you know what you are doing. But don't expect them to link key continental destinations directly. In our case the only economical way to get from point A (France) to point B (Germany) was via point C (Britain), and in the end included even a point D (Poland).

Here is how this came about. On a sunny day, a Ryanair plane whisked us from Limoges to Stansted, a former U.S. airbase in Essex 30 miles outside London. The fare was ?29.99 ($39), to which another ?23.36 ($30) was added for taxes and supplementary charges that have become a fact of life for travelers in the age of terrorism and high fuel prices. Still, a total of ?53.35 ($67) for a one-way trip from France to England is a bargain, or so we thought as we were waiting for our equally cheap connecting flight to Berlin.

That wait gave us an insight into a hitherto unknown world. Stansted is actually a more pleasant place than Heathrow or Gatwick, London's grubby other airports with their pushy passengers and often unaccommodating staff. Stansted is for people who still believe flying is fun. Did I mention they applaud their pilots? They are also patient. They don't snarl at airline personnel when things are not going their way, as definitely happened in our case. They stand or sit around patiently for hours and keep the place quite tidy. I like Stansted.

Well, we lined up for Ryanair's flight 8546 to Berlin-Schönefeld, once the principal airport of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic from where Soviet-made Ilyushins used to carry passengers to other communist countries. In our hands, we held computer printouts posing as tickets worth £17 ($22) each, plus approximately the same amount for taxes, credit card fees, baggage fees, insurance fees and further unspecified charges. All that seemed fair enough. For roughly $120, we would have flown in comfort from Limoges in the southwestern corner of central France to eastern Berlin.

But things did go wrong. There was a cloudburst, a near-tropical downpour so fierce that we feared that we might wind up having to take a boat to the Continent. Next we were told that Ryanair and its competitors had canceled all flights for that day. So now we found ourselves in the company of thousands of stranded travelers lining up without a murmur to be informed that, well, perhaps there was a seat for them on another plane the next day, or the next, or the next... "You are welcome to spend the night in the terminal of course," someone said. "But you know, our flights are always full. Perhaps there are some no-shows. Come back in the morning."

This is when low-cost travel suddenly becomes high-cost travel. Ryanair or Wizzair or Air Berlin or Easyjet won't put you up in a nearby hotel for the night and feed you too, as would Luft­hansa or British Airways. So all you can do is line up at a desk in the terminal and feel blessed to be assigned to a former manor house by the name of Down Hall in Hertfordshire for "only" £160 ($301) per night, taxi fare included. By now the cost of your journey has soared from $120 to $421, and you are nowhere near your destination.

So what does one do? Make this an outing, as we did. Luxuriate in the hotel's wood-paneled bar, order something English, such as a Ploughman's Lunch, only to discover that the hunk of cheese, which is a principal component of this dish, has the texture and coloring of an old man's foot - I know what I am talking about, I am an old man. And what was advertised to be fresh bread looked like leftover buns imported from a McDonald's in Kansas.

"Well now, did you have a pleasant stay," the whimsical Indian receptionist asked me the next morning as I paid my £82 ($155) restaurant bill. "Indeed, except for that old man's foot posing as a Hertfordshire cheese," I answered. The Indian chortled.

But then one must judge this interlude in a different manner. This was after all Europe, and we experienced Europe in a traditional way - call it stereotypes, if you will. There was the "traditional" English food. There was, at the bar, a young Norwegian carpenter with a flowing mane of blond hair doing what Norwegians traditionally are expected to do when outside Norway. He drank a very expensive bottle of Chablis, which was still vastly cheaper than anything he would find at home. Then he drank another one, then a double shot of Canadian whisky.

"How do you slake your spectacular thirst in Norway," I wondered. "Oh, we usually get drunk on cheap moonshine before we head off for one expensive beer in the pub," he explained.

Having experienced a stereotypical Norseman, I was now ready for a more southern stereotype. There was a youngish Italian in the lobby, restless and ill-tempered because all night long, taxis from Stansted had stopped under his window, robbing him of sleep. Now another taxi pulled up. He seemed ready to explode but then saw three pretty women alighting from the auto.

They entered the lobby. They inexplicably lined up side-by-side as if ready for a fingernail inspection at boarding school. Our Italian assumed the role of inspector, folding his hands behind his back, strutting up and down in front of the young women, his chin raised, until they burst out laughing.

This was really a good scene. It raised our spirits. Back we went to Stansted, back to Ryanair. "Any seats on a flight to Berlin or any place in Germany," I asked the young fellow at Ryan's customer service desk. He shook his head: "Not for another two or three days."

"Austria, then? Perhaps Holland?" He repeated, "not for another two or three days." In my imagination the costs of this low-cost excursion shot up to $1,500 or $2,000 for each of us. For that price, we could have chartered our own plane. Suddenly, though, being old proved a blessing. On the terminal's monitors, I spotted a Ryanair flight to Szczecin in Poland. When I was a child, Szczecin was a German Hanseatic city by the name of Stettin.

"Any seats for Szczecin, then," I asked the young man. He looked perplexed: "Why, is that anywhere near Berlin?" "It used to be Berlin's seaport," I answered. The fact that I was old enough to know that saved me thousands. A couple of hours later we were on a plane to point D in my odyssey - Poland.

Now, Szczecin sits on the German border and Poland is a member of the European Union, but don't think anybody speaks German at its airport, nor English, French or any language other than Polish, which is not in my repertoire. Still, I found out that there was a bus to the station about which locals later told me a strange fable while we were waiting for a train.

When Stettin became Szczecin in 1945, a warlock appeared before the Communist city fathers, so the story goes. He said, "I want to build you a beautiful fountain, right there by the railway tracks." Being Communist blockheads, the city fathers said, "no." So what do you think the warlock did next? He erected Szczecin's central station precisely where he had wanted to build his fountain - the ugliest, most uncomfortable station populated by drunks and littered with beer cans.

The person who told me that story was an exquisite Polish student we met under circumstances as quirky as this entire journey. You see, since Szczecin is so close to the German capital, Deutsche Bahn, the German railroad, included it in a scheme allowing five people to travel on one single ?27 ($34) ticket for one day in the Berlin-Brandenburg region.

My wife and I were waiting on the platform to board a tiny two-car diesel train that had just arrived from Germany, when this young Polish woman told us with a broad smile: "I have seen you buy a ticket for five. Will you take me with you? I'll pay my share." Then a male German student approached us: "May I come along, too?" Both wanted to pay their share, but we told them to just join us. Finally yet another woman joined our party.

As we chugged with a new, interim family through the flat, green countryside of the eastern German state of Brandenburg, we realized that instead of just traveling from point A to point B as normal people would, we had experienced life in a new Europe in rough sketches - France, England, the thirsty Norseman, the Italian peacock, the gorgeous Polish graduate from a Berlin university and the young German who was about to become a high school teacher of English, French and Polish and had just completed a year of university in Gdansk.

In short, being a born-again pauper is fun. Having lived all our lives like Jean de la Fontaine's cricket, we were in for an odyssey we would never have experienced in the company of people in gray suits in the front rows of regular airliners.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar in residence at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Mo., and has a home in the Charente region of France.