Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

19:  Home Again Home Again Jiggity-Jig

Friday we did nothing more than pack and go down to the bakery for a very unsatisfactory snack.  The fact that I broke a tooth on a paté pretty much sums it up.  Our flight out was at 6:40AM the next morning, so it was early to bed and early to rise.  Like 3:15AM early.

Saturday was all about getting home.  The car arrived at 4:30 to take us to Heathrow (I recommend this, because at £30, it’s about the same as the Heathrow Express and MUCH more convenient…in fact, I recommend budgeting for town car pickup and delivery on every end).  We got to Heathrow at 5AM, and already the check-in line at Air France was a mile long.  But, they were moving people through pretty quickly, and by 5:45AM we were heading to security.  Our flight started to board at 6:10, so we had time.

Until everything went pear-shaped.

Europeans just don’t seem to have gotten the whole “no liquids” security memo, and we were stymied by several people who were pulled to the side for “enhanced security,” their bags searched, and 500ml bottles of hair goop and perfume and skin lotion were all put into the dreaded Orange Bin which usually meant confiscation.  We were getting pretty steamed at these until my wife’s bag was pulled aside for “enhanced security.”

Ruh-roh.

At 3:15AM, you don’t always make the same decisions you might make at, say, 8 in the morning. After coffee.

Inadvertently, I had packed into our carry-on something that was supposed to go in our checked bags, and my wife was now carrying about 6 small, unlabeled vials of liquid.  This was bad news.  Adopting the “survive the encounter” strategy, we politely answered all questions, worked with the screener, and cooperatively came to the realization that, since I didn’t have a quart-sized bag of liquids, I could carry her previously undisclosed items (provided of course that they didn’t set off the alarms on the spectrometer).  It was hare-brained, but we got through it and made our boarding time.

And then we sat at the gate.  This flight was an Air France commuter flight from London to Paris, and we then had a 90-minute window to make our connection with the big non-stop Paris to Seattle flight.  One of the passengers kept walking up and down the aisle, and the captain kept coming on the PA to let us know that they were looking for a piece of baggage and we’d be ready any minute.  Was this guy walking up and down the aisle looking for it, or were they?  It didn’t matter, because they found it. Whew.

Then the captain came on the PA and mentioned “un petite probleme,” and all our hearts sank.  We’d missed our takeoff window due to the missing piece of baggage, and now we were delayed another 30 minutes, and almost everyone on the flight would probably miss their connection.  This was a disaster.

My wife, in her inimitable fashion, struck up a conversation with the Brazilian woman next to her who was heading home to Rio.  Her connection was even tighter than ours, and as we took off, the two of them, sharing anecdotes and laughing, seemed to be the only people aboard who were having a good time.  Arriving at Charles-De-Gaulle, we had fifteen minutes until our flight started to board.  We were in the same terminal, so how bad could it be, right?

How about this: we had to leg it down the corridor, take a train, and then saw that our gate was the next to last one in the entire terminal.  Oh, AND we had to go through security…again.  How can that possibly be in the same terminal?

Somehow, we made it with about 8 minutes to spare.  We got on, got settled, wiped our brows, and buckled up as we took off on the 9.5 hour flight.

In Seattle, after passport control, while we were waiting at baggage claim, we were paged (“…will Helen Jam-basty and Craig Jam-basty please come to the information desk.”) so that Air France could inform us that while we had managed to make it from one end of Terminal 2E to the other, our luggage had not.  Our bags were still in Paris, enjoying the 90°F weather, and should arrive tomorrow.

Surprisingly, we didn’t really mind.  The bags would come (or not) and all would be taken care of.  We were home, and that’s what we cared about.  We met our town car, got driven home, opened the door, and went in search of the cat.  The lawn was overgrown, but Seattle hadn’t had the big bloom we saw in Paris and London, so the trees were really only just getting started, and the wisteria was still asleep.

As I sat here out on the deck, relaxing, I could still hear wood pigeons behind me, though I knew none were there.  On our quick supply trip to the grocery, we looked for a good baguette, some ripe Camembert, a pain au chocolat, and came away disappointed.  I put a bottle of champagne in the fridge to chill, so that we might drink to what was undoubtedly a successful journey.  It hadn’t been perfect, but then, I never really wanted it to be perfect.  I just wanted it to be memorable (in a good way), and it certainly was that.  Three weeks was a long time, longer than I might want to take on next time, but we survived, we’re still married, and we are still talking to one another.

Thanks for letting me share this trip with you.

k