Day 21 & 22 – Paris to…London…to Los Angeles

I woke with an irritated groan. It was one of those nights of sleep where you don’t feel like you actually slept at all…even though there is a definite waking up, and an obvious passage of time. But, if you did, in fact, sleep, you don’t know when the sleep actually happened. And if sleep did happen, it was split up by multiple moments of “annoyed wakefulness.” So…I could have slept for 8 hours, or 2 hours. It sure as hell felt like 2. Plus, when I did wake up, it was bone-chillingly cold. The sweat had dried into a thin, greasy sheen…my eyes were bleary…and my aching teeth were in desperate need of a good, thorough brushing. It was not a pleasant way to wake up – I actually found myself missing the sugar ants and uncleanliness of our Roman hotel room.

The train was slated to arrive at 9:15 AM, which meant that, once we’d disembarked, we would have about 4½ hours to get across Paris to catch our flight out of Charles de Gaulle Airport at 1:45 PM. It was cutting it a little closer than I would have liked, but I figured it’d take, maximum, about 1½ hours to cross Paris, which gave us 3 hours at the airport to find our terminal, check in, eat some lunch, and board the plane.

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men.

I asked Erika was time it was. She looked at her phone – 9:00 AM. And the train was cruising along at a good healthy clip. I was expecting to see the Parisian suburbs, but I only saw some scattered farms, and the occasional unidentified train platform. We should

be slowing down soon, right?

But I didn’t worry about it. The train was about 30 minutes late, so maybe we were going to get in to town 30 minutes late – it was probably pretty tough to make up time on the rails. So I got up and decided to clean myself up as best I could.

I used one of the “sink rooms” to brush my teeth and wash my face. Now, I don’t like it when the faucet has one of those signs that warns that you’re not supposed to drink the water. I don’t know what that means – are they recycling the water that goes down the drain? Is it reconstituted sewer water? Can I brush my teeth with it? Or is it only good for washing hands (with a generous portion of soap)? Made me nervous…but I went ahead and washed up as best I could. It was going to be another 20 hours or so before I’d get the chance to scrub up again…I may as well risk the danger of bacterial contamination.

Returning to our room, I saw that the scenery was still flying past. Odd. I asked Erika for the time, and she told me it was 9:30. Surely if we were running half-an-hour late, we’d be slowing down.

But we didn’t. 10:00 came and went. Then 10:30. Then 10:45. I was getting pretty nervous – silently doing the math on our windling
“get across ....Paris....” cushion. 11:00. 11:15. Finally, the train slowed down. We had 2½ hours before our flight left. We’d planned on taking the RER back to the airport, but with our dwindling window, that was out of the question now – it had to be a taxi. 11:30 rolled by, and the suburbs of (what I could only assume were) ....Paris.... were also rolling by the window.

Mercifully, at 11:40, the train pulled into the station…two-and-a-half hours late. Our fourteen hour train ride had turned into a sixteen-and-a-half hour nightmare. And now we had to scramble out the front of the station and get into a cab for a ride across the city.

The train station was totally deserted. We had arrived at a station called the “Bercy” station, and (apparently) it was reserved exclusively for the ....Paris-to-Rome.... train. There was a single taxi waiting in the front of the station, and about 300 people were disembarking from the train. We hopped in the taxi queue – about 14 people back from the front of the line. Surely there were going to be a flood of taxis arriving shortly, once word got out that there were about some juicy fares sitting around Bercy, just waiting to be
picked up.

That is, of course, if Parisian taxi drivers were interested in working. But, instead of a flood of taxis, there was an agonizingly slow trickle. I looked behind us, and there were probably about 70 people in line. And a taxi would arrive about, oh, say once every seven minutes.

Doing the math there, that meant that we had to wait about 45 minutes before our cab would arrive…which put our departure from the deserted Bercy station at 12:25. Add a 30 minute ride (hopefully with no traffic) to the airport, and it put us in the ticket line right around 1:00 PM. I kept thinking: we’re screwed. We’re totally screwed. And it’s all because I wanted to take the train out of Rome. Stupid. Stupid.

Agonizingly, we worked our way to the front of the line, and
eventually our cab arrived. Now, this driver was not so good with the English, and we’d dutifully forgotten all of our French once we’d left the country. So we stumbled over our communications, and the driver asked us the million-Euro question: which terminal were we going to.

“Air ....France.....”

“One, two, three?”

“Um…is there more than one Air France Terminal?”

A hesitation…I was saying too much.

“Yes. Where are you travel today?”

“....London.....”

“Okay, okay.”

“Do you know which terminal that is?”

“No. But we stop and see.”

The idea of stopping when we were freakishly low on time was…less than palatable. But it sure as hell beat getting dropped off at the wrong terminal at that gigantic airport.

So we cruised down the freeway, which was thankfully moving
along quite nicely. After about 20 minutes, we came upon a little rest-area at the side of the road near the airport that had a big sign displaying terminal information. It wasn’t manned by anyone, but if I could crack the French code I should have been able to find out which terminal I needed. Our driver pulled up to the sign, and motioned for me to go look.

So I did. It was big, and confusing, written in all French, and it lacked detail. I saw our airline (which was apparently pretty popular in "France"). And I saw that it did, in fact, fly out of terminals one, two and three. Shit. There was another area with “destinations” on it, but most of the destinations were crazy international spots…like ..Morocco.., or ....Australia..... And they were sorted by airline, not terminal number.

Thinking about it now makes my head spin. But my best guess was Terminal 2. I can’t remember why, exactly – it just seemed to be the one that made the most sense at the time.

Hustling back to the car, I told the driver “Terminal Two. Deux.” He made a confirming noise, and we merged back on to the highway.

I got lucky. Or maybe I made a good choice. Either way, we
pulled into Terminal Two, unloaded our luggage, and checked out the readerboards for our flight information. In the Charles De Gaulle Airport, there isn’t one “central” Air ....France.... ticket
counter area, there are a half-dozen in Terminal Two alone. I found our flight, and got us to the correct ticket counter…which had a line with about 30 people in it.

I asked Erika for the time. 1:05. Shit. We’re screwed. Why bother? But we waited…and the line moved much quicker than we thought it would. Eventually we made it to the front, and after checking our ticket information, the woman told us that we were on “standby.”

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuck!” my brain screamed (forgive my profanity, all you non-swearers out there). No seats on the plane. No flight home. We’d have to get a hotel room and tell our ride that we wouldn’t be coming back today. We were screwed.

So we sat sullenly, with a couple other stranded passengers. Time was clicking by, steadily, and taking with it our hopes of getting home that day.

One of our fellow rejects was a woman…who dressed like she was French, but spoke English with no trace of an accent. She located a different ticket agent, and asked about our status (because we were supposed to have had a definite answer from the staff ten minutes ago).

The new ticket agent seemed surprised that no one had taken care of us…which was nice, because apparently we’d been forgotten. She brought us quickly to the counter, printed off two boarding tickets, and sent us on our way. I’m not sure exactly what the mix-up was, but regardless, we had our tickets…and the plane was leaving in fifteen minutes. We had fifteen minutes to get through security, find our gate, and get the hell on our plane.

Luckily, Europe has figured out “airport security,” so we breezed right through. Our gate was at the far end of the terminal, but we had a good ten minutes left to do the “Home Alone” sprint to our gate.

Even luckilier, there was a sizable line at our gate – no chance the plane was leaving on time.

Long story short (TOO LATE!!!LOLOELOEL!), we made it on our flight, thanks to Parisian “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” (thereby fulfilling the second instance of my “late 80s movie references” requirement).

It was an hour-and-a-half-long flight…we were at “cruising altitude” for, maybe, 20 minutes…but in that time they served us a full dinner…with airline food that actually tasted good.

We landed at Heathrow Airport with three-and-a-half hours to catch our connecting flight. Plenty of time…but, since we had had a bad run of luck with “cushions,” we figured we’d get our tickets and find our gate before exploring the wonderland of Heathrow Airport

Our connecting flight was with Delta Airlines. So we checked the monitors and saw that Delta flew out of Terminal 4. We were in
Terminal 2, so we needed to take a shuttle bus across the massive airport.

We got on the bus, and had that cheeky American reaction when the bus drove on the left-hand side of the road. L to the O to the L. An introductory video narrated by a stentorian British man was playing on a television at the front of the empty bus, right behind the bus driver.

We got off the bus at Terminal 4. It was empty. We went through the security checkpoint without seeing another passenger – the employees were just standing around.

This made my Spidey Sense tingle. I mean, if you’re all alone at an airport, either you’re early or you’re in the wrong place. Turns out, it was option B.

We asked about our boarding passes at the counter, and were politely informed (I only say “politely” because everything sounds polite with an English accent) that our flight was indeed with Delta…but it was operated by Air ....France..... We needed to go back to Terminal 2.

Back on the bus. An identical introduction by the stentorian British man. More “wrong side of the road” comedy. We still had 2 hours until our plane left. No problem.

We arrived back at Terminal 2, got through the security checkpoint, and followed the signs to the “Air ....France....” wing. The airport was undergoing some kind of renovation – but we were grateful that we were finally able to read the signs posted everywhere.

So with about an hour-and-a-half until our flight left, we arrived at the Air France ticket counter…which was mobbed with people. We waited…and after a good 20 minutes, we made our way to the front.

Apparently, Air ....France.... does not reserve seats on connecting flights. I’m not sure why this is – maybe it’s an “international travel” issue – but they were running out of room for our return flight. The nervous Air France attendant was in constant communication with someone at the gate, and we could overhear his growing concern that there were far too many passengers, and not enough seats.

Consequently, when our boarding passes were printed out, we
were seated several rows apart. This could not stand – we did not want to fly for 12 hours sitting at opposite sides of the plane. So Erika informed the frazzled young attendant that we were willing to volunteer to give our seats up to catch a later flight.

“Oh my God, thank you, thank you,” he said politely. He tore up our boarding passes, and leaned in conspiratorially “Take a seat over there, and I’ll be right with you. Are you guys willing to stay over night to fly out tomorrow?”

A night in England sounded just dandy. “Of course.”

“Great, thank you. I’ll be right with you guys…but be discreet. I don’t want everyone here volunteering to give up their seats.”

So we waited, and once the line had cleared he came over to
us and told us what we were getting. A night in a fancy “airport” hotel, a ticket on the flight home the following day, and 150 euros. We just needed to get our “package” from the lady at the ticket counter…by the baggage claim.

The scene at the ticket counter was…let’s say…“tense.” An American couple who had missed their connecting flight after arriving from Greece was arguing futilely with the French-accented desk worker (turns out Air France has another unpopular policy
of denying boarding passes for those checking less than an hour before their flight is scheduled to leave…something that didn’t affect us in Paris, for some reason…). There was a line forming
behind us, with one particularly irate French woman demanding that the ticket counter hurry up so she could catch her flight to Paris. (maybe she’d never heard of purchasing tickets online). But the lady helping us was a nice as could be expected of someone in her beleaguered position. We got our vouchers for a hotel room, meals,
money, and shuttle to and from the hotel.

Long story short (heh…take that, 78 pages of European blog-ness), we got to our hotel. Our stay in the outskirts of London was completely unremarkable – we’d touristed as much as we could stomach in the previous three weeks, and a night watching BBCs 1-4 was good enough for us (though we did make one disastrous hour-long excursion out of the hotel to find a clean shirt…though a driving wind and with a corresponding 30 degree chill).

So we ate, slept, ate, made it to the airport, flew, and (eventually) arrived in Los Angeles We got through customs completely unscathed (in spite of our irrational fears that all of our receipts would be checked, our liquor would be poured out, our gifts and knick-knacks would be destroyed, etc.), and greeted our incredibly patient roommates for a half-hour ride back to our home.

And that was our honeymoon in ..Europe... It looks like, save for my closest family members, I’d wager that most of my viewing audience petered out around Day 10 or 11. Which is fine. Hell, it took me almost three months to finish writing the damn thing…I can’t imagine that most people could plow through this much amateur prose without getting a little…bored.

But having said that, there’s more to come. I’ve already posted several photo albums on Facebook, and I’m going to do a “best of” entry. Eventually. Why? Hell…I don’t know…I have a
lot of time on my hands, I guess…

As for this blog…well… there’s a lot of stuff that I have planned for this blog. First and foremost, I’m going to branch out a bit. It appears that most of my friend list has abandoned the great experiment known as “MySpace,” and migrated to the much better “Facebook.” Alas, I am just as guilty…as MySpace is no longer a “check multiple times a day” website for me. Since I’m guessing this is true for most of you, I’m going to expand my internet horizons.

I’ll still update my MySpace blog…but I’m going to copy my 153 blog entries into a “as-of-yet-unnamed” blog site. Perhaps blogspot…or livejournal…or…wordpress…or…hell…who knows.
We’ll see. Either way, I’m going to keep writing. Why? Hm. I
honestly have no idea. I never really considered myself a writer…or, at least, a “good” writer. It’s fun to do, and I like talking about stuff, and I like when people read the stuff that I write. But…all right. I’m babbling. Fortunately for you all, this project is (mostly) completed…and I can focus on the really important things…like Lean Cuisine reviews…or complaints about Los Angeles…or blog entries about extra work. It should be
completely and utterly fascinating for all of you. Until then…