20240612 Wednesday, June 12, 2024: The Final Push Home
Thankfully, nobody decided to use the fitness center last night so we had a good night's sleep. It was nice that the Holiday Inn had modern air conditioning so we slept at a comfortable temperature and didn't have to feel like we were sticking to the sheets at night. It was also nice that the room was quite spacious. The only real problem was the ADA bathroom was poorly conceived and constructed because the shower flooded nearly the entire bathroom floor whenever anyone took a shower, and there was no big squeegee to get the floor dried, so you had to mop it up manually with the shower floor mat.
The Holiday Inn breakfast buffet had a pretty complete spread so you could have a full english breakfast, or fresh selection of baked goods in addition to cereals, toast, fruit, cold cuts and cheeses. Ben made a couple of sandwiches for the airport with some fresh baguettes. We're sure going to miss the fine breads here in France. They have a way of making breads with crisp light crusts and a substantial but open textured crumb that hold up really well in sandwiches, but are also quite tasty in their own right.
After checking out, we boarded the free Hotel Airport Shuttle van with two members of a private charter flight crew from Portugual. They cater frequently to tour groups that travel by cruise ship one direction, and then fly home on private charters for the return trip. Many of these are German clients. They also did trips to and from the Caribbean, which they really like doing as flight crews.
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The hotel shuttle dropped us off where it had picked us up yesterday- terminal 2B. CDG airport is a massive complex, so getting around can be confusing. There are light rail services between some of the terminals and hotels, in addition to bus service and multiple train lines also serving the CDG airport. It took us a while to first fine the check in counters for Delta Airlines, and then we had to find our way through French customs and passport control and security.
Exiting France was pretty simple. We put our passports in a scanner which then opened one set of doors. Then a camera took our photo and matched it to our passport and opened a second set of doors. Then we handed the passports to a bored looking passport agent who simply manually stamped a blank page and waved us through.
Getting through security was a bit more work, but they were well staffed and there was no real line. However, they were super sticklers to detail, requiring laptops and tablets be taken out and put on their own trays to run through the X-Ray, and Janet got a pat down because her foot brace kept triggering the metal detector wand. Ben had forgotten to take an iPad out of the carry on suitcase, so he had to take that out, and they then searched everything in the suitcase, swabbed it all for explosives residue and ran the iPad through the X-ray by itself. Then Ben had to repack everything back into the suit case. It was a good thing we gave ourselves plenty of time to get through the check in, customs and security procedures.
We did manage to get through all those processes and to the boarding gate about 45 minutes before boarding began. When we did board, we were surprised that unlike most flights we have been on, this one was far from being sold out, at least in the Economy Plus section. There were several empty seats and even an empty row two rows behind us. There was one open seat in our row of 4 seats between us and a stranger in the opposite aisle. After the plane got to altitude, some people moved quickly to occupy the empty seats/rows so they could lay down for portions of the flight.
The flight was just under 10 hours. The leg room in Delta Economy Plus was generous enough that we could recline our seats without guilt and we could nap reasonably comfortably, although a first class fully reclining sleeping pod would have been nice. It was just hard to pay an extra $1000 per person for that. Ben watched a Dune marathon since both Dune and Dune 2 were available. Flying from east to west, the jet lag isn't nearly as big an issue as it is flying from west to east because it's like staying up really late one night, rather than missing out on an entire night altogether.
We had departed Paris at 4pm, and ended up arriving in Seattle at about 5pm, so it was like we were traversing the lines of longitude nearly as fast as the earth was rotating beneath us, flying over the UK, Iceland and Greenland, and then angling down across Canada to Seattle.
Sea-Tac's new international arrivals terminal is very nicely done. It is modern, efficient and easy to navigate. We got thorough luggage collections and then using the MPC (Mobile Passport Control) App to pre-upload out passport and photos while waiting for luggage to arrive, we pretty much walked straight through US customs to the airport exit.
It sure is a nice thing to be able to take the Whidbey Sea-Tac Shuttle from Sea-Tac home to Oak Harbor. Ben spent most of the trip napping, but this was the first time we had seen the new Mukilteo Ferry terminal in detail. Most of our trips have been one way towards SeaTac so the shuttle just drives right off the ferry and heads up the Mukilteo speedway to the interstates.
Our son Price picked us up in Oak Harbor and we were plenty ready to retire straight to bed after walking in the door. We had been gone since May 3, when we started this transatlantic adventure to visit our Son John in France. It was good to be back home in time for beautiful spring weather to arrive in the Pacific Northwest.
We really enjoyed the transatlantic crossing by cruise ship and would not hesitate to do another transatlantic crossing by cruise ship. We just wished that we had known that we could have stayed on the ship and ended up in the Baltic, rather than spending nearly 2 weeks driving around the UK. It would have been much more enjoyable and less stressful.
Driving in the UK is not at all enjoyable, especially with the extremely tight schedule that Nordic Visitors had outlined on their itinerary. We would NOT recommend that itinerary to anyone. It was much too rushed, and it did not include parking arrangements in key locations. Parking in the UK is a HUGE headache. All the tiny villages have inadequate provisions for tourists traveling by car. All have pay lots that require a minimum of 2 hours payment, when you can pretty much see what you want to see in under an hour. None of the big cities accommodate tourists in cars either. After getting home, we were notified by the car rental company that we were charged $85 for having accidentally driven into a "Charge" zone. We had no idea what the sign meant- we thought it had something to do with electric cars, but we were just following Google Maps instructions to a castle, and when we got there, we could only directly turn around and leave immediately. We had hoped to see a castle that was a film site for the Harry Potter movies, but instead got stuck with an $85 charge to drive 3 blocks in an extremely stressful super narrow cobble stoned street to nowhere.
There are vast stretches of the English, Scottish and Welsh countryside that are spectacular to see, but the driving on the suicide lanes is so stressful and difficult that you can't really enjoy seeing the countryside. You're driving on a 12' wide bit of torn up pavement with 2 way traffic, no speed limits, and blind corners every which way you look. Driving in Australia was so much easier and enjoyable. We can now see the charm of doing a bus tour to see the English countryside because you'd never have to drive. I can say I hate driving in the UK, not because you have to drive on the left side of the road, or because they have roundabouts everywhere- those things are fine and easy enough to get used to- but because it seems everything else is set up to make driving as uncomfortable, inconvenient, and expensive as possible. Pretty much the exact opposite of the US's car centric culture.
The Railbookers France section of our trip was much less stressful and enjoyable because we spent a minimum of 3 nights at each place and did not have to drive at all. Lille, Paris and Lyon all have excellent mass transit systems that are reasonably easy to figure out, and both Lille and Lyon are very walkable cities with plenty of charm and history. Although our rendezvous with John and Ciara in Lyon was brief, it was very enjoyable to share in our adventures together in a new setting.
After spending so much time in the UK and France this spring, we are really appreciative for how beautiful and wonderful life is in our little corner of the world in the Pacific Northwest. We're glad to be home.
