Friday, 29 June, Paris to Tallahassee

Written 4 August 2018

On Friday, our travel day, I never got around to taking any photos at all. We wanted to check in at last 2 hours before our flight, it's a 45-minute ride to the airport, and we wanted to allow extra time in case our scheme of calling for an Uber car didn't work. I had already checked out the taxi stand at Place de la République at 7 a.m. on a random weekday morning (three taxis were waiting there), so we allowed time for me, if we didn't find an Uber ride, to hike to the metro, take it one stop to République, grab a taxi, take it back to the apartment to pick up David and the luggage, and then head for the airport.

And it's a good thing we allowed so much extra time, because we needed all of it. The Uber thing was a piece of cake—six minutes, and he was at the curb. We made good time to the airport, then ran into the first snag—traffic jam at the departure doors. Quite recently, since our last departure from CDG, the authorities have introduced a new system at the "dépose minute," the area where cars pull up to the curb to discharge departing passengers. To discourage people from waiting there and clogging the area up (arriving passengers often ask their rides to pick them up at departures, because the curb at arrivals is so busy), and to generate a new income stream, they have erected barriers at the entrace to and exit from the area. To enter, you take a ticket, as you would for a pay parking lot, which you must present again at the exit. The first 10 minutes inside the area are free—plenty of time to meet someone and and to load them and their luggage or to drop someone off and unload their luggage. After that you pay by the minute (at least a euro or two a minute). The problem is that the bottleneck where you have to stop and take a ticket is backing traffic up for half a mile and causing long delays.

So it took us longer to get to the curb than it should have. Inside, we found the board that directed us to the right desk for check-in (in American airports, any kiosk or desk will check you in for any flight (of that airline), but at CDG, you need to get the right kiosk or desk for your flight). We addressed ourselves to the kiosk and went through the whole check-in process, only to have it tell us it couldn't check our bags and print our baggage tags (as it advertised it could) because of something about our tickets. So we stood in line at the desk where it sent us, and the employee there couldn't make it work either. She escorted us to line for the supervisor's desk. When we got to the head of that one, she explained that our tickets did not allow checked bags. What?! It took quite a while to get her to say what she really meant, which was that they did not allow free checked bags. That was wrong, since David is silver medallion, which allows free bags for him and for his travelling companion, so we waited while she called headquarters to check. We were right, so she escorted us to a machine that could print our baggage tags. It was out of blank tags. We waited until she went to fetch a new roll, only to find that the machine itself was broken. She took us straight to the head of a line somewhere to get them printed, attached them, and put us in quite a short line to hand them over to the baggage-handling system. We quickly reached the head of the line, but just as the first of our bags was lifted onto the conveyer, the whole conveyer system ground to a halt! More phone calls—a bag was jammed in the conveyer somewhere down the line, five minutes tops to clear it. Ten minutes later (of course), the conveyer started up again, and our bags disappeared into the system.

Written 5 August 2018

Security wasn't too bad, although we don't get special TSA precheck treatment even for Delta flights out of CDG, so we (mostly I) had to get out all our electronics. At least we didn't have to take off our shoes or prove that the computer would boot up. But then they found some problem with the bag of the passenger behind us and stopped the conveyer, with David's backpack still in the "don't reach in here" zone. After a long wait, his pack finally emerged, and we could head for the gate. The boarding line was just forming, and I even had time while David held our places, to go to a nearby shop and acquire hot chocolate and buns for breakfast, but I'm glad we allowed the full four hours between leaving the apartment our flight time!

The flight seemed to go quickly, maybe because I watched (count 'em) four movies (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Justice League, Dirty Dancing, Lego Ninjago Movie) and still had time for the scavanger-hunt opisode of Big Bang Theory.

For once, Global Entry and customs worked smoothly, so we made our rather short connection in Atlanta and met the Westminster Oaks van at the Tallahassee Airport right on time.

Now that I reach the end of this diary, I realize I have a ton of material left over that didn't necessarily belong to a particular date or fit a particular day's narrative, so next up, we have "Miscellaneous stuff."