One Day Everything Went Wrong

It must have been an omen: everyone was downstairs in the lobby, the taxis were waiting to take us all to the airport, and one girl was missing. When I called her room, she said -- well, I won't tell you what she said -- but it was obvious that she was still sound asleep. As it turned out, it didn't really matter, because the choir conductor and I had both misread our reservations, and we arrived 4 hours before our scheduled flights.

I go to the desk to see if we might be able to get an earlier connection, as we're cutting it close to be in Paris and checked in to our hotel before the Bastille Day fireworks at the Eiffel Tower. Yes, we can connect earlier, through Frankfurt, but it only gains us 45 minutes and it will cost 100 Euros to change our flight, so I agree when the man behind the desk says, "Better off to wait for your flight and spend your money at the restaurant upstairs..." That, it turns out, was my first big mistake of the day...

The flight to Frankfurt takes off without fanfare, all of Chloé's friends aboard, and not long after we board our own flight to Stuttgart. That's when the sky opens up right above our heads -- thunder and lightning and torrential downpours -- and we sit in the plane for an hour and a half before I concede that we've missed our connection to Paris, the last one from Stuggart for the day. But there's hope...

We can connect through Munich (the pilot calls ground control to assure there are seats), so we jump out of the puddle jumper into the pouring rain and run to change our tickets. Unfortunately, we can't do this at the gate, only at the ticket counter, and by the time we get there we're eligible only for the waiting list, so they won't guarantee Paris seats either. We do make it back through security and onto the Munich flight, but by the time we get there, the next Paris flight is full, so we have to wait two and a half hours for the next. Wouldn't you know, the last flight to Paris is late, so we arrive there just as the fireworks begin.

We run to get a taxi; there's still hope that we could catch the tail end of the fireworks if we move quickly. But there's a problem: the taxi driver is happy to take our money, but not take us into Paris -- he categorically refuses to enter the city. So for $85, we're dropped off at 11:30pm, 4km from our hotel. We walk, with baggage, over cobblestones, against massive crowds of people who all got to enjoy the fireworks, dammit, and don't get to our overpriced hotel until nearly 1am.

It's surprisingly rundown, dirty, and noisy, and we have to lean way out over the balcony to see the Tour Eiffel, although none of that would have mattered nearly so much if we'd been there for the extravaganza. We have to get up at 5:30am to go to another airport to catch our flight to central France; I'm taking it all in stride until the woman at the front desk (who has check us in and out) says, "Well, you really didn't stay long, did you?" Yes, and that makes this the most expensive night in a hotel I've ever spent in my life. For several seconds, long chains of expletives run through my brain, but then I remind myself that these are the perils of travel.

Some days (and nights), it seems, nothing goes right...