A Side Trip to the Vaterland

I. Am. Furious. After waiting for 2 hours for my flight to Philly (which was supposed to leave at 11:30), I was finally put on a 2:30 flight to Charlotte. Apparently there were some mechanical issues on the Philly-bound plane, and it would’nt be ready for flight until 6:30 or 7, if at all.  Then, at 2:00 when the Charlotte plane landed, it hit a flock of birds and wouldn’t be flying either.

Great.

So I’m currently sitting in the back seat of a mini-van taxi en route to Florence (about 1.5 hours away from Myrtle and an even smaller airport), in order to catch a short 6:08 flight to Charlottte. From there I’ll fly from Charlotte to Frankfurt (departure: 8:45), and from there to Paris in the morning, arriving in Paris about 3 tomorrow afternoon.

Those of us in the taxi just got word that the flight from Charlotte has been delayed 40 minutes (again, due to maintenance), so now we leave at 6:50. Luckily, that’s enough time to catch my yet again connecting flight to Frankfurt.

I’m furious that now THREE maintenance issues have caused me to lose half a day in Paris. Don’t they understand??? I have so many things—so much living—left to do there, that I need to squeeze every hour I can out of the trip. It’s not as if I can just stay an extra night or easily go back the next weekend.

This is Paris. (And not the idealized, romantic Paris, either. It’s the grimy, smelly, noisy Paris that I love.)

There hasn’t been a single day out of the past 390-something days that I haven’t gotten homesick for Paris. And how that it’s so close I can almost (literally) taste it, the now 110ish hours I have to spend there are all the more dear.

US Air, you have a very unhappy camper on your hands. Wish I could start a grève.

Brb while I brush up my German…


(Next-day afterthoughts: Ok, so maybe I over-reacted. I mean, its not like US Air caused the birds to fly into my CLT plane, right? Plus, I got to wake up to the vaterland this morning! Couldn’t ask for a better ‘Welcome to Germany’, huh? Danke, Germany. Danke.)