A few days (Ok… almost a week) late but you know how it is, when you leave work for 2 weeks you come back a month behind. Ugh.

The road home…

For some reason I never remember how long the road home is after the easy slow mornings, the sunsets, the donkeys and doggies and the winding roads of bucolic Europe. My state of mind quickly acclimates to that environment, the appreciation of simple fresh foods, the art everywhere, the vistas and the history.

5am comes mighty early.

On the road at 6am for the airport in Marseilles.  It’s always such a relaxing drive to a foreign airport for the first time to return a rental car and make an international flight. Sean the GPS in a last bit of “trust me or don’t..” takes us on a route that has everyone in the car wondering if we programmed the right destination.  Sean has never gone south to go north, never gone east to go west, but today, he does. We stop to check our program, we confirm with Jack’s Waze app, genuflect and carry on. Yup, Sean the GPS takes us on those windy country roads one last time before getting on the A7 Autostrada to Marseilles and the airport. As expected (read hoped and prayed) there is good signage to the rental return and though they are more relaxed and “whatever” than we would like, the car return is uneventful.

Marseilles airport is a relatively small airport and at 7am on a Friday there are no crowds and the lines are blessedly short. There are automated everything. Even passport checks. We get through security with remarkably little fuss.  Even though the machine checked all our passports, we are inspected 2 more times and asked 3 more times if we packed our own bags (yes we did, the maid service was on strike) and if anyone gave us anything to take with us. Uh, has anyone ever answered “yes” to that? Then we wait.

Do you remember when people dressed to fly? Do you remember when flying was something of an event? I understand the economics… the fuel futures game, the labor costs and the supply and demand issues but what I don’t understand is how these factors can possibly justify the economy class seat.  I have said more than once that flying now is like taking the Greyhound was in the past. Crowded, smelly, cramped and generally not a very pleasant way to get from one place to another. Problem is, there isn’t an option to flying like flying was to the bus… I suppose we could have taken a boat, a freighter passage is about $120 per day per person. It does take about 11 days to make the crossing which is a bit of a logistical problem in a two week vacation. Seems we have to resign ourselves to the ignominy of “modern” air travel.

Marseilles to Amsterdam. Last 2 seats in the last row of the plane. You know, those great seats that don’t recline because they’re up against the back wall of the plane. Amsterdam to Minneapolis. 8 and a half hours. For some reason they fed us 4 times. Of course ½ the bathrooms on the plane were out of order, but our seats reclined. I suppose it’s good they fed us so much as airport food makes me nervous and you have to take out a second mortgage to pay for it. Waiting in Minneapolis is hard… So close we can feel it. Minneapolis to Grand Rapids. We board pretty much on time and push away… then we wait. There’s weather in the way. Captain tells us they are plotting a new course south through Iowa and Illinois then back up to Michigan. We wait. Captain tells us that the weather went that way so they are plotting a new course… north then back down into Michigan. We wait.Eventually we get off the ground and a couple of slightly bumpy hours later… Grand Rapids.

We left the house in Marseilles at midnight Grand Rapids time and arrived in Grand Rapids at about 9:30pm. 21-1/2 hours of travel. Then there’s that weird kinetic energy that doesn’t allow me to sit still for another couple of hours. But we’re home and the cat isn’t mad at me for going away.

And now that I’ve recovered from the jet lag… I think I’m ready to go back.