Day: 8: Back to the States

We decided to get up early, grab a croissant and coffee, and head to Jardin du Luxembourg, a 60 acre park right by our apartment. We went to a bakery for our croissants (I'll miss you chocolate croissant!), then cheated and went to Starbucks. We were just dying for a large cup of coffee that wasn't so strong. It was delicious! The park was lovely. We were back to the apartment at 8:30am to grab our stuff and metro to the airport. Our flight was at 11:40am so we wanted to leave plenty of time to find our way. Miraculously, we did great with the map and metro system in Paris, which led to some false confidence.

We got on the metro B line to the airport. I innocently asked a girl while we were riding about the airport. I knew we were in trouble when she started shaking her head no. We followed her off the metro, and she found someone who could speak English to tell us where to go---platform 32 or 33 in that stop. Around and around we walked----finally we found it. We got on and other people had luggage so we thought that was a good sign. It was almost 9:45am by this point though so we were pushing it. Next we notice that there are two stops for the airport, depending on what terminal you're at. We found a nice man who let us borrow his cell to call American to find our terminal stop. In the meantime, a young girl with a baby in a stroller attempts to get off the metro. We are preoccupied with finding the terminal, and she waits too long to get off (okay, so maybe our bags were in her way), and the baby stroller gets stuck in the door! The nice man and the Mr. yank on the door until it reopens and the girl gets down safely with the stroller. It was scary and distracted us from our nervousness of missing the flight (for about 10 seconds). We arrive at the right stop and have to weave to get to the check in counter. We hustle there to see that we have 15 minutes to spare before cut off for check in--hurray! But...they say we have to go to ticketing! We race to ticketing, weaving in and out of a very crowded aisle with all our stuff. We get there, she starts working on our tickets since we were a last minute change, takes our credit card to pay the change fees, and it's declined (even though we already alerted Visa that we would be leaving the country---arghhh). Now is not the time. We finally get the bank card to work and start working our way back. Only 5 minutes left! This place is packed, and we are full speed running back to check in! We are weaving, body checking, and I'm running over more than a few toes with my bag. The Mr. decides to pick up his bag and use it as a shield in front of him; he also checks his share of passerbys (and quite possibly leveled an innocent woman though he didn't have time to turn around and check; he just heard a loud "awww"). I know no French, and the Mr. doesn't remember much from high school so we don't even bother with saying, "I'm sorry"; we've got a flight to catch! We make it in time and finally get to catch our breath.

We pass through security and passport control without incident and caught the flight fine. We had great seats this flight (in front of TV and with lots of legroom) on a newer aircraft which was wonderful. Our flight was on time (even early). When we were going through passport control in the states, a couple of foreign people went under the rope and cut in line, and our fellow Americans were exchanging looks, completely annoyed...ahhh.... home again, home again.