France Ski Trip Day 1: Flight Across the Pond

My flight does not leave until around 10pm and when do I decide to arrive at the airport? 3:45pm...

The early arrival is so my ride can avoid the horrible traffic that builds around rush hour.  Although, upon entering the departures area I am greeted with a woman screaming at the AirFrance check-in desk.  Security and her friends talked her down but this made me very uneasy about my upcoming 10 hours of travel time with this airline.  Even so, I had no trouble with AirFrance and would fly them again.

Before checking my bag I burned some time reading and found myself next to a family, the son playing Angry Birds on his Dad's iPad.  Now, I remember when I more than thrilled as a child to have a new action figure to entertain me for 7+ hours on a jet...now the kids get iPads...


I get through security without a hitch (not even body scanned) and proceed to my terminal to find my overpriced dinner for the evening.  It is then I realize that I am one of maybe a dozen people in the whole airport.  Thursday must not be very popular for international travel.

Photo Credit: Me

I consume my chicken club with fries slowly, sipping my beverage and thumbing through my French phrase book. At this point I am about 2.5 hours early for my flight.  I get bored and pay for my meal.  This leads me to sit near my gate to charge my phone and see who else I would be sharing a Boeing 777 with for the next 7+ hours.

            I wait...I wait some more...gee this flight is going to be empty...

Eventually more travelers start to show up (at a more appropriate time than myself) and an older couple sit near me.  The man brags that he actually washed his pair of pants yesterday.  He says they smell a whole lot better.

            So, you normally don't wash your pants and they smell horrible?

I continued to keep to myself after hearing this fact.

Sleep evades me on the plane.  I might have slept for an hour or two out of the total time it took to get to Paris.  I navigated my way through security again and found my terminal and gate to Lyon.  The terminal was very bright due to it being a glassy bubble shape.

Photo Credit: Me

Fun fact: I was told and I later found out for myself, there is no concept of queues/lines in France.  People were stacked 50 deep in front of the gate even before the first boarding announcement was made.  When they did call certain rows, the ones not in those rows would just stand there blocking the way for the ones that could board.  This carried over to the blob of people at ski lifts, buying metro tickets, etc. 

Luckily I got on the plane without a problem, immediately fell asleep, and woke up only about 30 minutes away from Lyon.  We'll pick up my journey with my attempt to find my friend I was meeting there...this proved a lot more difficult than expected.

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