I received a notification before the chickens (or us either for that matter) were up, that the flight from Paris to San Francisco would be delayed... A little later, another notification...and then another...and then another...Anyway, the flight wasn't leaving until sometime in the afternoon. So, we no longer had to hurry. Instead we got to the airport, where we learned the flight wouldn't leave until even later. We spent 5 hours at the airport waiting for the flight.
I think my wife took this picture at the airport.
When the time to board our flight finally did arrive, my wife and I were pulled from the line and grilled about our backgrounds, jobs, purpose of our trip, etc. I thought there were several other individuals who appeared more deserving of a hasty interrogation...but we were the lucky ones.
I don't know if our answers mattered, or if the procedure was just to ask the questions and, absent some confession of planned wrongdoing, to let us go on our way. So we never got to be strip searched, or grilled beneath a bright light in a room that smelled of coffee, stale cigarette smoke and fear by a guy with a moustache and an eye-patch, reeking of Brute cologne. (Which makes me wonder, if he were really tough, would his moustache have its own eye-patch, or would his eye-patch have its own moustache? No his cologne would be so strong that it had its own moustache and eye-patch!)
We break now for something completely different:
Just a moment ago, my wife sang our excitedly, "I found a husband!"
For a brief instance I was nonplussed (and I wasn't doing any other exercises in arithmetic either), before I asked hopefully, "Can he support us both?"
She explained that the discovery wasn't for herself; she was doing some family history research, and had found the elusive information on a husband to one of her ancestors.
No gravy train there. Oh well. Maybe next time.
Back to the regularly scheduled tedious travelogue:
The flight was exactly that for which one hopes when flying over an ocean, or over anything else for that matter: uneventful. Thinking about that, I was about to write that it was both long and monotonous, which recalled to mind Verlaine's Chanson d'automne, which seems fitting (but not because we were hitting the beaches of Normandy):
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure
Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
Our arrival at SF was more eventful. First we had to do the customs thing. We rushed. I especially rushed to get in front of two ladies dragging suitcases. I just knew that they were going to delay us; it was just a feeling I had. We had another flight to catch that was leaving in less than an hour. I really didn't want to miss it.
We had to deal with a machine that demanded to scan our passports, which had to be held just so; and it also had to scan our faces; one had to stand just so. The first time I did it, I got the scanning of the passports and faces switched (mine for my wife's), and had to do it over. It went much more smoothly the second time. We did that, and answered a few questions about the purpose of our trip and what we had brought back. It seems like they asked something like, "During your stay abroad, did you abscond with any children or historical artifacts? If so, does the value exceed $200.00?"
Then we got to wait in line again to see an actual human who would review the answers given to the machine. Can you guess who was immediately in front of us in the line? The two ladies with the big suitcases. They were very nice. I joked that I had seen them earlier and had made a special effort to get ahead of them; apparently they were much faster on the machine, not having had to scan everything twice. They were very nice. When they learned that we were trying to catch a connecting flight set to depart soon, they insisted that we go ahead of them in the line.
After we got through customs, we met Gandalf.
Next time: Gandalf at the bridge, and more airport fun
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