This paper is devoted to the study of the large scale geometry of the excursion set and nodal set of a planar smooth Gaussian field at criticality $\ell=\ell_c=0$. We prove that there exists $s_1>1$ such that with high probability, macroscopic nodal lines in a box of size $λ$ are of length at least $λ^{s_1}$. As an application, on the event that a box is crossed by a nodal line, then the shortest crossing is of length at least $λ^{s_1}$. We also prove that there exists $s_2<2$ such that with high probability, the shortest crossing is non degenerated, that is, its length is at most $λ^{s_2}$. The argument for the lower bound is based on a celebrated paper of Aizenman and Burchard [1] that provides a general argument to show that random curves present a fractal behavior. For the upper bound, our proof relies on the polynomial decay of the probability of one-arm events which was proven in [4].