It’s a Good Thing I Hedged my Bets! – Sunday, 24 September

I rather intensely dislike the actual process of traveling, especially by air with its hurry-up-and-wait dynamic for get-to-the-airport-3-hours-ahead international flights. I hoped that my flight to Paris, operated by Air France, would serve some good food, but I also hedged my bets with a burger and beer at the gate while I was waiting!  It’s a good thing that I did.

My dinner on the plane was rotini pasta with a gooey thick tomato sauce, a “salad” of orzo (more pasta – huh?) with a faintly saffron-y dressing, unsweetened applesauce, Tillamook factory cheese, a baguette-shaped hunk of fairly dry bread, and a square of slightly stale chocolate cake with a mousse-y type filling. So French. NOT. Glad that I had that burger at the gate! Breakfast some hours later wasn’t much better – a sealed glass of OJ, nonfat blueberry yogurt, fruit cocktail, another of those nasty baguette-shaped dry buns, butter and Smucker’s strawberry jam.  The coffee was quite good (yaay!) but nobody offered a refill (boo!).

The Airbus A340 was pretty old – it made some slightly distressing rickety-creaky-bendy sounds in flight – I was happy that my noise-cancelling headphones mostly drowned it out!  I didn’t use the entertainment system ‘cause I had other stuff to do, but also because it was about four generations old with very grainy images. The seats were very narrow, but they reclined much further than others I’ve used. The flight was only about half full, and the people around me were graciously careful to move to a seat with nobody behind them so they could recline fully without whacking someone’s kneecaps!

The lines at passport control were longer than I've ever seen them. Yikes! There was even a recorded message apologizing for them and associating the problem with heightened security. But those of you who have traveled with me recently know that they usually wave me over to the "Priority 1" line when they see my limp and my cane! Today I'm sure it saved me at least an hour of standing in the enormous snaking-back-and-forth queue.

Gotta say that I liked taking this late-evening-departure nonstop flight (rather than my usual mid-afternoon one) because it got me to the apartment in the early afternoon on Monday and I didn’t have to hang on to my bags waiting for a 3pm checkin time! It also helped that my Uber driver was a rookie and took a few wrong turns that landed us in blocked streets, lengthening the trip in from Aeroport Charles de Gaulle.

But all’s well that ends well, right? Especially when the end is Paris centre ville!