How to Miss an International Flight or Metro Confusion

A couple of weeks ago Shereen and I were scheduled to fly to Chicago to complete the Visa paperwork for our stay in France. Our travel to and from the airport was less than ideal, to say the least. The good news is that we had a great time in Chicago and there was no problem with the Visa application. But that diverts from the story.

From Orleans it is about an hour and a half to the airport, without traffic. With traffic this can easily double. Someone told me that a good way to get to the airport was to drive to a metro station outside of Paris and then take the metro to the airport. The idea being to avoid any traffic jams in Paris.

Our flight was leaving at 10:20 am on Saturday. We were on the road before 6. After this a series of small time losses at each link in our journey added too much time. We lost a few minutes driving around to find parking at the metro station. Then several minutes dragging our bags up stairs, across the metro line, down the walkway, up stairs again, back across the line (we didn’t need to cross in the first place), finally finding a ticket machine. Then onto the train for a longer ride than we expected: about 90 minutes to the airport.

And before we reached the final stop we were burned by the quirks of train travel in Europe. When you enter a train no one checks your ticket, you could sit down without any ticket and no one would stop you. But there are random checks where the ticket-checkers walk through the train. You might get lucky and they don’t check, or if they do, and you don’t have a ticket, they charge many times what the normal ticket was. Well, I didn’t read the ticket machine properly, so we had tickets that took us only to the center of Paris, not to the airport on the north side. One stop before we were to get off the uniformed officer came through and informed us we would need to pay extra. What was normally a 7 Euro ticket would now cost 25 Euros. At least he had a portable credit card machine so we could pay right there.

Then off the train into the airport. It was now about 9 am. I had ordered our tickets through Northwest, but hadn’t looked closely at the flight, which was actually going to be a KLM flight. Thinking Northwest, we walked up to an agent guarding the entry to check-in. She said that the Northwest line didn’t open until 9:15. So we waited. If I had been thinking, I should have know something wasn’t right, since on international flights you need to check-in one hour before the flight. Well, after walking up to the security questioners, they sent us to the KLM desk, which was a short walk down the aisle. By the time we got through the questioners again, it was after 9:30 and the agent informed us the flight was closed.

After a few minutes of consternation they offered to put us on a flight later that day for free if we could prove we were in the airport before 9:20. Fortunately we had talked to the agent who told us to wait until 9:15, so she remembered us and was nice enough to state our case. So we were put on a Northwest flight leaving 4 hours later, which had much better movie service than the KLM flights.

When we returned from Chicago we had to retrace our steps through the metro. Unfortunately our flight arrived during rush hour. Believe me; you do NOT want to be dragging large, heavy bags through the Paris metro with thousands of workers rushing to get home. It was shear chaos. We blocked narrow walkways, struggled to climb stairs as people pushed past, and were confused about which connection we needed. After several minutes of frustration we determined we would need to ride one train, and then take another to where we parked the car. We didn’t understand well enough and the first train ended up stopping in the center of Paris. The whole train emptied and a mass of people packed in. They looked at us strangely and a few said something in French. We knew they were asking where we were going, I said the station, and somehow they communicated we needed to get off this train. People were packed shoulder to shoulder, but a few stepped off the train and stood at the door to ensure it wouldn’t leave, the rest passed our bags over their heads and Shereen and I squeezed through the rest. We now had to drag our bags through more crowds, up more steps, and squeeze onto another train. At one point were packed in tightly with sweating neighbors leaning on one another as the train rocked. After what seemed like hours later we arrived at the car, vowing never to take the metro to the airport, or use the metro during rush hour.