Morocco 2019 - Day 8 (7/21/2019) - Back to NYC

Nothing of touristic significance happened today, as the only task at hand was getting back to NYC.  We awoke to our alarm at 2am, planning to be on the road by 2:30 - our Royal Air Maroc flight from Tangier to Casablanca left at 5:15am.  We missed this target by a few minutes, but mainly because there was nobody at reception when we went to check out.  Fran tried ringing the bell and calling room service while I went to retrieve the car from the garage.  The clerk eventually showed up, and we were able to get on our way.

We made a quick stop while still in town to top off the fuel tank, and then continued on to the Tangiers airport, only a bit over a 20 minute drive without the stop.  We had more confusion getting into the airport parking lot, and then even more trying to figure out where to drop off the car.  We drove over to a parking attendant to ask for help, and despite the language barrier he was able to understand that we were dropping off a Sixt car.  I pulled the car into a (seemingly arbitrary) spot in the middle of the parking lot that he directed, then we retrieved all our luggage and headed into the terminal.  It was barely 3:15am by now, and none of the stalls (including the Sixt one) were open.  We again asked for help from a security guard (or maybe a policeman?), and he indicated that it would probably be OK just to toss the car key through a cutout in the window into the stall; which I did.  At the time of writing (later in the same day), I have not actually received confirmation from the company that they have received the car...though I did email them to ask.

In addition to shops and stalls not being open, the airline check-in desks were also not yet open; we waited perhaps 20 minutes before we were able to check in, and then about 5 more before we could enter the boarding gate area.  I was surprised to see that the Tangier airport only had 3 departure gates, as the city seemed big enough to me to warrant an airport closer to the scale of that in Casablanca - shows how little I know (turns out Tangier has about 1 million people, compared to Casablanca's 3.4).

In any case, the rest of the journey home wasn't very eventful.  The ~1 hour flight to Casablanca was on schedule, and we both dozed for a good chunk of it.  We had no trouble making our connection in the 65 minute layover before the flight to JFK.

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Pictures: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sBEieH9QzNCeqwCy5