Dad and Pam had a 10:30 am flight out of Marseille. After getting Maëva ready for her last day of pony lessons with her class and saying goodbye, we set out for the airport shortly after 7:30. Rush hour and a traffic accident turned the forty-five-minute drive into an hour and forty-five minutes! Luckily, we'd left early. We arrived at 9:20 and I'd been shooting for 9:30! Perfect. Turns out we were lucky. Shortly after leaving the airport at 10 to drive home, I noticed an accident that had happened behind us was blocking up traffic on the road we'd just been on thirty minutes before. Had we gotten stuck in that mess as well, they might have missed their flight. I got home in a mere forty-two minutes. I did some laundry, some dishes and some straightening up. Now the house is back in order and ready for our next guests: Evan and Julie in just 8 days!
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Oh, cool! Didn't know the UT set was heading your way!
Our travel day was one traffic jam after another. We got to Paris for our connecting flight, and had clear sailing until we got to passport control going into the international terminal. They have something like 8 or 10 double booths. Two were occupied - by one person each. We crawled forward. Time passed. Our flight started boarding. 20 minutes or so passed, and then an airline employee yelled "Washington! Anyone for Washington?" About 20 of us moved to the front of the line. Directions to our gate ended at an elevator, where we discovered we had to take a bus. More waiting. Then a bus, which wound around for a while before stopping. We boarded a mostly loaded plane and settled in. About the time we should have been on approach to Dulles, Pam was watching the map and said "Why are we just circling over Delaware Bay?" Turns out a line of severe thunderstorms came through right when we were arriving, and they briefly shut down the airport. So we had to land in Philadelphia and wait a couple of hours, refuel, and then fly the hugest passenger plane in the world - the double decker Airbus 380, about a 100 miles to Dulles. The thunderstorms lasted about 15 minutes, causing us a 3 hour delay. Nature 1, technology 0. Then we got on the funky double ended people transporters that Dulles still uses to haul people to customs, and got stuck behind a Lufthansa jet being pulled to a gate. Our entry back through immigration was smooth, but we had one more short but intense traffic jam to go - right when we got our luggage loaded in the Lyft car and were ready to go, two more vehicles pulled in at odd angles and blocked us off for a bit. Glad to be home, finally!
Post a Comment