The Getting Home Rant

I’m going to start off with a rant about AirFrance and our trip home from Italy. And tomorrow, after I’ve had some sleep, I’ll post nice things about our trip.

Short Version (see below for Long Version):
We got bumped from two different flights and instead of flying direct from Paris to Seattle, wound up spending the night in New York. All AirFrance’s fault.

Long Version (see above for Short Version):
It started on the ground in Florence.

We boarded the plane just fine, then sat on the tarmac for an hour because Paris was foggy. This was a problem because we only had an hour and a half layover in Paris, but the flight attendants seemed pretty positive we would still make our next flight.

Left on our own, we probably would have made our connection in Paris. But the French got in the way. In particular, Monsieur Blockhead wheelchair assistant. The French and Italian airports are NOT equipped to handle disabled passengers, and they make the biggest and most inefficient fuss over how to deal with us. In CDG, they brought a special little elevator-cart lift thing, which they then took FOREVER to operate. Monsieur Blockhead told us on the lift that “ce n’est pas possible” to make our connecting flight, and he would take us straight to a ticket agent to get onto a flight two hours later. We argued argued argued, insisting that we go to our gate instead, because we still had 20 minutes, and many of the flights were delayed because of the fog.

I could tell that Chris has had a lot of practice arguing in French, because his vocabularly suddenly expanded while all my French absolutely disappeared under stress.

We got off the lift-thing, and Monsieur Blockhead led us on a tangled route through the back hallways of CDG. We saw the signs for Terminal E, but Monsieur B cried out, “No, no! Follow me! Everything will be all right!” I should have run him over with my wheelchair.

Instead of taking us to our gate, we went through a door and found ourselves outside security in a line to re-book a flight. Where Monsieur Blockhead abandoned us. NO!

We got out of the line and ran through security to our gate, but of course, had just missed the flight. Merde!!!

Next we went to see an AirFrance ticket agent, who told us that our options were a direct flight to Seattle the next day, or the “in two hours” option which would take us through JFK and get us home at 10:30pm (instead of our originally-planned 1pm). We chose door number two.

Of course, they weren’t done with us yet. Normally, wheelchair passengers get to board first because it takes us a little longer to get settled on the plane. Chris and I have our routine down. We head down the ramp, leave the wheelchair at the gate while I use crutches to get to my seat, they gate-check the wheelchair, and voila!

Back to the European inability to deal with disabled people. They made us wait for another wheelchair assistant to take me down the ramp, because I could not be trusted to do it myself. Apparently this is a highly-skilled position, because only one person could do it, and he wasn’t there yet (oh, the French and their metiers). We begged one guy who had taken another passenger down if he could take me, since he was finished. But “ce n’est pas possible!” And then ten minutes later, this same fellow who couldn’t possibly help me down the ramp because he wasn’t the right person, came back and took me down the ramp.

And then we sat on the tarmac for an hour and a half, while they brought in and installed a “spare part.” So our comfortable 3-hour layover in JFK was immediately whittled down to an hour and a half.

We lost more time in the air, and then it took 20 minutes just to taxi in. We asked the flight attendent in the air if there was anything she could do to help us get off the plane and through customs quickly, because we were now (again) worried about making our connection. She seemed pretty positive we would make it. I’ve learned that they always say this because they don’t want to deal with passengers’ wrath.

And we probably still could have made the connection, but AirFrance had one last little trick up their sleeve. Re-checking the bags after customs. Whenever I’ve done this in the past, I’ve always just shoved my bag in some corner, and it meets me at my destination. AirFrance, however, had one agent who was checking everyone’s bag individually. There were some 30 people ahead of us in line, and we were down to 15 minutes before take-off.

Didn’t make it. So we spent the night in New York. Flew Delta the next morning and had no problems. And were home by noon. Our 16-hour trip home had turned into 40 hours.

I am off to bed, and will post more pleasant-to-read things tomorrow.

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