Grounded

Here we go: it’s 6:30 am on Monday. We’re going to Vienna for Christmas. Our flight leaves at 9:50 am. After trying to drive to the airport we park our car in Melun and catch the train into Paris to get to the airport because the roads are terrible and we drive a Euro-sized car. Flight status: on time.

The train ride was seamless. Awesome! It’s 8:15 and we’re on the last leg of our train ride. Flight status: on time.

It hit the fan when we got to CDG. Almost everything’s cancelled. All the people who were delayed (snow) Saturday and Sunday are there. Plus all the people coming in for today’s flights.

There are no lines roped off. There are no chairs. There are two people working our airline’s desk. Two. Two people I feel very sorry for. “Can’t call the airline, you have to wait in line” we’re told by an employee. Try to call for hours anyway, to no avail. So wait in line we did. For almost 10 hours. 3 hours after our flight was supposed to leave, the airline's website still doesn't say it's been cancelled. We meet some nice American students going home for Christmas while studying here. N meets someone in his field. I meet a bunch of French people that I grumble with (the French love a good grumble). They also love yelling at people who cut in line, which is surprising, because generally, most of them aren’t very good at forming a proper line in the first place. We watch 3 screaming matches. One involved hair pulling.

N holds down the fort while I run back and forth for food. McDonalds runs out of Nuggets (not the Nuggets!), salads, and big macs.

In the end, we’re rebooked for Wednesday. Making our 5 day, 2 destination trip a bit useless. We’re given 7€ each in food vouchers. Nothing else.

We get home around 10:00pm. We’re bummed after speaking to our insurance, who are no longer covering the cancellation of the trip. We call Expedia.ca. We’ve booked our flights and hotels through them. They can’t refund our flights, since the airline had rebooked them, but we get a full refund on our hotels, even the one we had booked for that night. We have never gotten such excellent customer service while travelling. We call the Canadian office of our airline. We ask them to cancel our tickets and give us a refund. They do, in no time. Wished we had thought of that 12 hours earlier!

While it’s a shame that we missed our trip (I’m much more zen about it today than I was yesterday) it’s ok, we’re happy to be together and have someplace to be here. And here, as A pointed out, is still France. There were a lot of devastated people at the airport who won’t make it back to see family and don’t have places to stay. So in the end we’re pretty fortunate.