So I'm not the only one who would fall asleep on the couch after a day's adventures.
All good things come to a close--we had an early morning flight out of Naples (fortunately for Amanda the airport is less than a half-hour from their house) and so set the alarm for 3:30 a.m. This is the first time I had used my phone as an alarm--so we were rather startled to hear the Vienna Boy's Choir singing "Good Morning." (too cheerful for me--I have since changed the alarm)
What was disorienting (yet again) was that my phone was still set on Tallahassee time, so according to it we were getting up at 9:30 p.m. the night before. Hmmmmm
But other than the ungodly early hour of arising, it was a smooth trip home although Bob seemed to be having the week catch up with him.
While he napped from Naples to Paris, I got on with the knitting (remember the knitting?)
We had a four-hour layover in Paris. Not enough time to get out of the airport and see anything. So we had a coffee and pastry just to say that we had done so in Paris, and, knowing that we'd be in a cramped flight for 8 hours or so we did laps around the waiting area. It's pretty well designed for tired travelers.
They also had round sleeping pods with piped in music--they were all filled with sleepers so I didn't get a picture--I feel a little pervy snapping shots of sleeping strangers. We did the rounds of the fancy stores (have I mentioned before how convenient wheelie bags are? Great if you lug your bags while looking at shops). Do people really pay $10,000 for a watch in an airport? Is that an impulse buy?
There was a rather nice art gallery, and a beautiful living green wall.
which was pretty big.
Then we heard the announcement that all travelers who have a connection to make dread: "The flight on Air France to Atlanta has been delayed."
Urg. I like Atlanta well enough, but I really wanted to go home and didn't fancy spending the night there. We vowed not to worry--either we would make the connection, or deal with it if we didn't.
The delay was only about 20 minutes--we still had a chance. Finally boarding time came and it was such a relief to find that we were on an older 747, which meant wider seats and air nozzles. Ahhhhh--we had dreaded another trip on the cramped stuffy hot new plane.
And just as we taxied out, we caught a quick glimpse of the Eiffel Tower off in the distance. So we can say we saw it.
However, new planes do go faster than old ones, and we were flying into the Gulf stream. Timewise we kept hovering between "no way we'll make it" and "we have a chance" We took off running when we landed, went through customs and security in record time, and took off running.
We missed our flight by approximately 7 minutes . . .
We were lucky--there was another flight in 90 minutes, and two seats available on it, so it was only a short delay to getting home.
Knitted while we waited. Hadn't gotten much done on the trip over from France because they turn off the lights for most of the trip.
Finally we were in Tallahassee, our car started just fine, and the house was still there and all the cats were happy to see us. We were both groggy--it's had to sleep on a plane and neither of us had. I kept checking the clocks--trying to work out our travel from the morning in Naples to the evening in Tallahassee. Finally realized we were muzzy headed because it had been exactly 24 hours from door to door.
Needless to say--on Tuesday we slept.
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