Getting There can be less than Half the Fun
Packing for Paris is a process of picking and paring that can be perturbing, and as a result it can take you longer than planned. This year I had the welcome distraction of watching Maria Sharapova’s elegant (she wore a sequined black tennis dress which she had designed especially for night games) run to the finals of the US Open to ease me into decision-making about what to pack for our two week trip. Sporadically I would take a break from Sharapova’s tennis, put the television on pause and return to packing for a few minutes.
As I chose and sorted, I discovered things I had unintentionally sequestered away and definitely would not need for the trip (e.g. an expired discount card for Officemax); as a result I ended up deciding to discard or keep items I had forgotten I owned. It was a purging process. The one dicey item we had to get past the TSA guardians at the airport was two fifteen pound Kettle bells for my French photographer friend Vincent, a new devotee of a Russian martial art that required their use. He had tried ordering them from the US but shipping would have cost more than the items themselves. Vincent had them sent to me at the office; we tossed them into a small duffle and got to the international check-in desk at Delta. It was the only one of our three checked bags that demanded scrutiny. Watching as the agent used a box-cutter to open the packages, we were anxious, unsure whether to explain to the agent what they were or to remain silent. The Kettle bells passed muster and we were on our way.
A few days before I was to leave a friend suggested using a homeopathic product from REI entitled No Jet Lag, which contained Arnica (Leopard’s Bane), Bellis Perenis (Daisy), Chamomilla (Wild Camomile), Ipecacuanha (Ipecac) and Lycopdium
(Clubmess). Skeptical, I figured the least it would do is keep vampires away.
As usual I took in one last cultural gulp of Americana in the Salt Lake Airport before leaving for two weeks: a wall display of twenty-four different Louis Lamour titles in the book store, a ‘French toast’ bagel in a bagel shop (nearly gagged at the thought), and a man speaking loudly on a Bluetooth phone implanted into the left side of his head from among the linear phalanx of men relieving their bladders in the men’s room. Thank god for hands-free technology.
Our trans-Atlantic flight on Air France was a piece of cake. I slept little and watched two films: Quatre Etoiles, a French situation comedy, and the Hitchcock classic To Catch a Thief with the exquisitely beautiful and subtly seductive Grace Kelly. The No Jet Lag (taken after takeoff and every two hours until landing) seemed to help keep me effortlessly awake.
We had planned a rendezvous with my daughter at Charles de Gaulle so we could carpool together into Paris. She was flying in from Frankfurt and we had arranged for a private shuttle bus for the three of us. Her flight was on time, but there was no evidence she had been on it. I checked with the Air France desk but they could not tell me whether she had flown on either of the two flights that would have taken her to meet us.
“Cette information est privée,” he said without emotion.
“Qu’est-ce que je peux faire? Rien?” I said, trying to remain non-plussed.
He made a gesture of resignation universal to all cultures.
I moved over to the paging desk to explain again my dilemma and asked if they could page my daughter. Apparently airport paging is a thing of the past; could it be considered a code for a terrorist action? Frustrated, I decided to call Delta in the US. Naturally I blamed my travails on George Bush. As I reached the international desk at Delta via Ekit (a reasonable international calling service: www.ekit.com), my daughter Andrea showed up looking haggard, fatigued, and relieved. She had been wandering around terminal 2D at Charles de Gaulle, not at all sure we would find one another.
Ten minutes later we were in a taxi to our apartment in the 3rd arrondissement. The cost was 50 euros, a bargain just to get away from Charles de Gaulle for two weeks.
©. Louis Borgenicht
