When people are going through customs they usually have to travel through a long tunnel. This area is international ground so for a short time these people are stuck in an in-between place; they obviously aren't still in the country they left, but neither have they arrived in the country they're going to. This in-between-ness is known as "the long tunnel."
This weekend I went through the long tunnel. Well, a long tunnel.
We were on our way to the Eiffel Tower. It was starting to get dark and we really hoped that we would get to see it sparkle. We got in line at about 6:45 and the closer we got to the front of the line, the closer it got to 7:00 (the Eiffel Tower sparkles every hour on the hour.) We bought our tickets at 6:59 then sat staring at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower for a minute. It didn't sparkle.
The tickets we bought let us climb up to the second floor of the tower. We didn't have time to wait in any of the elevator lines so we decided to take the stairs. Maybe it wasn't the best idea considering I am terrified of heights and we were so short on time, but we did it anyway.
We started out really strong. But the higher we went, the slower I got. I get afraid on the stairs going up to water slides, why in the world did I think climbing the Eiffel Tower was a good idea?
Looking back, I honestly have no idea how I made it up all the stairs. But in fact, we made it up so quickly that we had plenty of time for pictures. Even though we didn't make it to the very top the view was still amazing.
Eventually we had to leave. We thought we had plenty of time until we got stuck behind a couple holding hands. They were taking their time, as well as all of ours, strolling down the steps.
We managed to sneak past them at the first floor and started running
down the Eiffel Tower stairs. It was almost exactly like the scene from
Monte Carlo -- you know, the one where they're about to miss their bus
so they have to run down the stairs of the Eiffel Tower and that one
girl is afraid of heights?
Unfortunately the similarities ended there and there was no hot Australian to offer us a free trip to Monte Carlo because I happen to look like a British heiress...
From there we literally ran to the metro. The guys selling Eiffel Tower key chains didn't even try selling us anything, they just got out of our way.
We checked the map and ran to catch our metro. As we ran up the stairs we watched it pull out of the station. So we checked the map again and started to worry about time.
Once on the metro, though, there wasn't much we could do. So we sat and watched time tick by and counted down the stops.
We jumped off, pushed through the slow-moving crowd, bought our tickets, and ran to the RER line. Once again we watched the train pull away from the station just as we ran up.
Even at this point, I still believed we would make it to our bus. We joked on the ride over about what would happen if we missed the bus, we stressed about time, and we created ridiculous scenarios about how the bus could be late.
We looked like two drunk girls coming home from a night of partying - at 8:30 on a Sunday night. We were laughing, crying, and overall freaking out.
The RER train pulled into the station at 8:45. Our bus was also scheduled to leave at 8:45, but this is France and we were confident that it would be late. We only needed a minute or two. So we ran outside to the coach station and started frantically searching for our bus. We saw it pulling out onto the freeway so we ran up the hill to stop it, only to realize it wasn't actually our bus.
Despite our best efforts, we had missed our bus back to Lyon.
Shock started to set in as I realized we had no way of getting home nor did we have a place to stay. We were stuck in a long tunnel - no longer touring Paris, but not back in Lyon either and no way of getting there. Plus, we were literally in a long tunnel walking to Terminal 3.
The saga ends here.
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