Bit of a rocky start on Moroccan fun

I have a million great things to say about the trip but must first document the wild arrival.

All went great leading up to our almost first landing: easy trip to the airport, good book, second row seats. The latter is a real feat on Easyjet without assigned seating, and we strategized mightily to score those.

The trouble started on our descent into Marrakech when the wind kicked up and we had to circle the city a couple times hoping for it to die down. We're usually unfazed by rocky flying, but the circling and jostling combo had us searching for the special inflight bags. We were pretty relieved to divert to Casablanca where, if we could foresee the future, we would have deplaned and jumped in a cab.

Instead, we waited for a couple hours to fly back to Marrakech. Upon approaching the runway though, we heard the robotic voice from the cockpit insisting that we abort landing before we sped up and away from two close attempts. With a lot of circling for good measure. Sadly, Casablanca was windy now too, so we diverted a bit further to Agadir, through all those mountains above. pretty, but boo.

This time, Easyjet kicked us off, and we continued our journey by taxicab. Not of the yellow sort or even the fun round black ones in this hood, but a mighty questionable vehicle without seatbelts, an English speaking driver, or doors that open from the inside.

We were lucky our driver worked in Spain for a while as he could communicate in Spanish a bit with Jeremy and the Australian lady we shared a cab with. He wasn't a bad guy, but he was awfully thirsty, made multiple coffee stops, easily distracted, took his eyes off the road more than soap opera actors, somewhat loco, passed busses and goats and trucks in blind mountainside curves, and forgetful, misremembered the cost of the trip we agreed upon.

When we got to our hotel ten hours after our ETA, they felt so bad that they served us an awesome free dinner and a bottle of wine. If they knew how much I love free stuff, they'd have known that this more than made up for it. Our riad (house like hotel with no roof in the middle) manager Ismael almost got a big bear hug.