Trip to Europe - Part 10: Don't Mess with the Travel Gods

We have our last dinner in Florence at Vini e Vecchi near the Palazzo Vecchio. The food is wonderful as it has been throughout the trip - I have a beef stew with peppercorns and beans. Our conversation is retrospective in nature; it's been an amazing trip. But then we stray into darker territory before we depart for home: travel horror stories. Blithely I say, bad things have never happened to me.

The next morning as we finish breakfast, we get the first hammer blow. Our flight to Paris is cancelled. We hightail it to the airport to deal directly with those who can fix things - we find no such people. We try to get onto another flight to Paris that might save our connection to San Francisco, but that flight fills up, so we get a later flight, hoping to reschedule our connection.

We make it onto a six-fifty flight, and at about five o'clock we make our way through security to wait in the departure lounge. All seems somewhat salvaged until that flight is also cancelled. From there things unfold like this:

• A small asian-looking gate attendant tells us to board a bus so we can get our luggage; the bus takes us around the airport to the arrivals gate, where our bags are dispensed and collected.

• She then arranges for a bus to Pisa, and we are all herded into the parking lots with our bags, where we load and board a tourist bus for the hour-long ride.

• We are brought to the Pisa arrivals counter and blast the entire passenger group through baggage check-in and boarding in amazing record time.

• We board another bus which then whisks us out to an awaiting plane; we leave Pisa just before nine o'clock.

• We arrive at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris at about eleven; the terminal is basically shutdown, and the remaining Air France staff books us into hotels for the night.

•  Then a couple of the Air France agents actually drive us to the hotels in little vans (the hotel shuttles have stopped running).

• The kitchen is also shut down by now, so we coax a sandwich and some pomme frites from room service.

• The next morning, we catch our flight to San Francisco.

Thus ends the lesson and the trip.

[ <<< Back to Part 9 ]