Homeward Bound - Paris Part 4

Click on these to read Paris parts one, two, and three.

Of all the people to be stuck at an airport with, I'm glad I was with my friend Montserrat because she reacts well in a crisis. If she didn't live in Canada I might vote for her for president. She didn't sit on the ground and start crying or complaining about how unfair the situation was, she started helping me find a solution to the problem.

We were at an airport/train station so our first thought was to check for trains. There was one leaving in five minutes, but first class was the only option left. It was also going to cost 250€ and we weren't that desperate... yet.

Next, we checked online for another bus. They were reasonably priced and left at 8 the next morning, so we bought the tickets. Unfortunately, IDBus requires you to print your tickets before you can board, so we set off to find some way to print our tickets.

At an airport.

On Sunday.

In a country where everything closes at 8 on the weekend.

The Sheraton Hotel on the third floor of Terminal 3 was very helpful and offered to print our tickets for free, but their computer couldn't pull up the PDF. Information wasn't at all helpful because they had closed at 10:10. (Seriously, who closes at 10:10? That's just weird.) SNCF was even less helpful. The lady who could print wouldn't because it was for IDBus (a company within SNCF, by the way) and the guy who wanted to help couldn't because he didn't have Internet access. Finally we went downstairs and asked Hertz if they could print our tickets for us. Originally they said no, but after we desperately pleaded, they made it work. When the guy walked out with our printed tickets I was honestly speechless. I couldn't even express to him how grateful I was because I was in shock that we actually had tickets.

We were going to make it home.

Still, we had 8 hours to kill before we could get on our bus and go home. The airport terminals were freezing, so we sat in the lobby of the ibis hotel for a few hours. Around 1 in the morning we decided to try and find some dinner. The 24 hour bar was only for guests and also didn't have any food. The vending machine was beyond disappointing and extremely overpriced. We then had to walk back to the airport terminal in search of food. Nothing was open and we were forced to settle on the airport vending machine which had much more variety. The machine only accepted coins, so we pooled our money and came up with 4€70 for dinner. It was probably the most pathetic dinner ever imagined in France.

After eating we laid out on the floor and tried to sleep with all the people who were waiting for connecting flights.

It worked for a while. We had been on a bus the night before and had gotten a maximum of four hours of sleep. It was now 2 in the morning and we were tired. Unfortunately, we weren't so tired that we could ignore the freezing, hard, dirty tile floor. We began to long for the warmth of the ibis lobby and its comfortable chairs. At 4:45 we couldn't take it anymore and we went back to the hotel and tried to look like we weren't sleeping in their lobby because we were too cheap to pay for a hotel room.

It's now 6:45 and I've had a lot of time to think about the long tunnel we're in. Although we spent the night in Paris, we're not really in and able to enjoy Paris. We didn't even get to see the Eiffel Tower sparkle. But we are also not able to go back to Lyon. We're stuck here in this in-between place without a warm place to rest or good food to eat.

One Week Later.

I eventually made it back to Lyon. There were only three people on our bus and so we were able to lay out over four seats and actually sleep quite comfortably. At some point we stopped for food. I hadn't eaten anything besides a Special K bar in 20 hours so my sandwich was really something special. I also missed my least favorite class because the bus got in so late, so I guess all's well that ends well.

Finally back in Lyon

Well, except Notre Dame. Notre Dame is celebrating its something-hundred and something anniversary and had construction all over its beautiful square. But that is a story for another less-sleep deprived day.