Made it!

Despite several attempts by Continental Airlines to screw up my trip I managed to get here safe and sound. Well…relatively sound. Certainly safe.


Had a heck of a day getting out. One of my favorite things on this planet is to go down to Memorial Golf Course on a Sunday morning, signup on the walk-on list, then go into the Beck's Prime and have a Cisco on a flour tortilla. A Cisco is scrambled eggs smothered in chilli with cheese and onions. (My cardiologist is less enthused than I about this practice.) So, since it was my last morning in Houston I thought I should treat myself to a Cisco at Memorial as a parting gift. Wasn't to be.


I turned down Westheimer from the hotel and headed toward Hwy610. How am I susposed to know there's a marathon, or 10k, or 5k, or, who knows, a 50 footer race going on between Richmond and Memorial drive and the police have blocked every road into the Memorial area. It took me about forty minutes to get through, and when I finally did, I saw they were all being funnelled into Memorial Park. So, Poncho, no Cisco. (You gotta be pretty old to get that reference.)

Okay. Continental Airlines. Logged into Continental to print my boarding pass. I have three bags, one pretty heavy. First problem: the webpage let's me declare only two (2) bags. Don't know why, but I can choose 0, 1, or 3. There's no way I can say three since adding the last two isn't allowed. Thinking they may mean the first one is free and I have two "adders," also known as revenue enhancers, I tell them I have two. Then they ask if any are over 50 pounds. Well...I don't know. One seems pretty heavy but my bathroom scale isn't handy (it's in storage) so I, wishing to avoid problems say, "Yes," one is over 50 pounds. So, now I'm charged $25 for an extra bag plus $50 for an overweight one. This, unfortunately, leads me to believe it isn't one free and two extra, but two bags only. Oh well, to be sorted out at the airport.

At the airport, sure enough, I've got problems. First the overweight bag isn't. So, good news, I'll get a credit, right? Well, maybe. The other extra bag? Yep. $150. I'm not sure there was $150 worth of stuff in it...but it's got to go so I say, "Bill me baby, hit me with your best shot." Turns out their best shot is hit me for the $150 extra bag fee but have the system refuse to properly credit my card for the erroneously charged $50 heavy bag fee. The guy tells me I'll have to call customer service on that one. I then ask, "Is that the same customer service that kept me on hold for thirty-five minutes last Friday while I tried to upgrade my flight?" Yep. That's the one. Lucky guy, what?

Oh, and about that upgrade. When I was scheduled to go last week I'd applied for an upgrade expending 20,000 miles from my One Pass program. I was put on a wait-list. Whenever we had to reschedule because of the failure to get the visa, our travel agency evidently managed to save the company $500 on the new flight. Problem? Oh yeah. Now if I want to upgrade I have to pay the $500. Wrong answer. Oh, okay. If you want to re-deposit your 20,000 miles you have to pay $150. Oh yeah. Be gentle with me. Okay, bending over here. After explaining the visa thing causing the reschedule a nice fellow who'd called trying to maximize their revenue by charging me the $500 and the 20,000 miles for the upgrade on the new flight, agreed to wave the re-deposit fee. Important point: I haven't seen that re-deposit in the account yet.

So...now I board the plane and we take off. I plug in the (free, can you believe it?) earphones and tune to the oldies channel (10) and prepare to read a new book. After two-and-a-half to three minutes the channel stops playing, and, after a short, but quiet, pause, resets itself to channel one. That'd be the opera channel, of course. Okay, reset to channel 10. Three minutes later, it resets again. Suffice it to say, after a futile attempt by the chief steward to reset the program for my seat, then the empty one adjacent to me, we (he) give up and he offers to buy me a drink. I don't want a drink I want the equipment on this airplane to work. I point out to him that this is relatively low tech audio/visual stuff and if they can't make this work it brings questions to my mind about their ability to run slightly more complicated equipment oh, I don't know, up front in the bloody cockpit. He, of course, said that equipment worked better than this. Feeling just oh so much better, I read, wrote a letter to the CEO of Continental, and reset my audio channel every three minutes for a nine (9) hour flight across the Atlantic.

Arrived actually earlier than scheduled. Some of that equipment must have functioned properly after all. Paris, indeed, the entire country, was enveloped in a dense fog. As we descended I saw a red light pass under the aircraft then saw runway lights almost immediately as the plane touched down. Thank you technology!!! As we taxied to the terminal the fog, as on my previous trip to Nantes, made everything look like a black and white movie out of the thirties. I expected to see a body laying on the tarmac and Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart walking arm-in-arm off into the fog.

Had a four hour layover before our connection to Nantes. So Jerry (yeah, my traveling companion is named Jerry, too) and I, after spending probably $20-$30 on roaming calls and text messages finally managed to get together at terminal 2D in the Café Select. We started at an Irish Pub at the end of terminal 2D but the guy in there, evidently, decided he wasn’t waiting on us today and left us sitting there in dire need of café noir. We, as I’m accustomed to do, decided to vote with our feet, so we went to the Café Select.

Now, here’s the thing about French service. There appears to be only one kind. Bad. You see, tips are automatically added to the check over here, usually at a 15% rate. Now, in the states, to get a 15% tip, a waiter has to do something…you know…like…waiting on the customer in a reasonable time. Here, there’s no upside to that. So you wait on placing the order. Then you wait on getting the order. Then you wait on paying for the order. I think I now understand why there’s this thing called the two hour French lunch. Everyone would like to go back to work, but they know they aren’t going to be able to because the waiter hasn’t deigned take their order, deliver their food, or collect for it in anything resembling a rational time frame.
But, there’s an upside to this service thing: it give one time to look around. And, looking around one notices things.

Daily Observation
Lots of young people in airports in France. Young French men are pretty scruffy looking, many having wispy little beards that look like they could be shaved with a medium sized cat and a small quantity of milk. The girls? Wow. They’re cute, and, I think, many may be felons.

I wish I understood why God gave me thirty year-old eyes and a sixty-four year-old body. Seems like cruel and usual punishment.