Leaving Paris

 May 3. Going home.

Although our return to the United States made for a very long day, the flights were on time and uneventful with very little turbulence. 

We were up at 6:00 am, showered, dressed and finished tidying up the apartment before we left. Our Uber driver, a very nice man from Mali, was on time and we sailed through the suburbs of Paris. The only stall came as we neared airport grounds. Traffic slowed to a painful crawl due to traveaux (works). As we approached the departure gates we soon realized another reason for the congestion: cars/shuttles/taxis had to pay a small fee of €1 to get to the lanes to drop their passengers! 

That was only the beginning of a series of absurd incidents trying to get to our gate. Upon queueing up for the check-in desks to drop our bags off and get our boarding passes, there was a man asking oddly irrelevant questions of each person waiting in line. How did you get to the airport? Where did you go on your trip? How did you get there? How long did it take? Why were you here? Why are any of us Here? What is quantum physics? Mind you he wasn't writing any of this down or keeping any sort of account of our answers. He was just there to apparently annoy everyone and hold things up.

Then it was a series of more showing the passports to a variety of individuals who may or not have had anything to do with anything but whose task was simply to slow things down, look at papers they may or may not have understood before scowling and allowing us to move to the next absurd station.

We eventually cleared all the hurdles and made our way to one of the new concourses at Charles de Gaulle airport where we settled in to await our Delta flight to Detroit.

The flight took forever to board, as our passports had to be checked one more time, we had to go to another station to actually scan our boarding pass and finally we were on the plane. 

After nearly 8 hours of sitting in a chair at 38,000 feet, with only the occasional screaming infant to mar the otherwise tranquil mood shared by a couple hundred strangers, we were soon back in Michigan.

The absurdities concluded once we reached Detroit airport. Get this, once we cleared passport control, we had to wait for our bags coming off the plane, then schlep them about 100 feet to an area that said "Recheck your bags" -- the bags were already checked through to our final destination -- hand them to a guy who then just placed them on the conveyor without looking at anything and we moved on to our final gate. 

We had about 2 hours to kill and kill it we did with a glass of wine and a cheese board. 

Our flight to Grand Rapids left right on time and after a short 20-30 minutes we were down and heading for baggage claim. Our neighbor Sandy had kindly agreed to pick up us and she was waiting in the cellphone lot for our text that we were curbside.

Once home we unpacked a bit but mostly just enjoyed being able to relax after a long day of flying. Sandy had kindly left us a delicious pasta cucumber salad which was the just the perfect thing to help welcome us home. It was then off to bed early for a much-needed night's sleep.