Technically we arrived in France yesterday, 4 hours late, but missed our connections to Lourdes and had to reconfigure the final leg of the trip from top to bottom. What was supposed to be an easy transfer from the airport in Paris to the train to Lourdes ended up a traveler’s nightmare with the missed train connection and no other trains available FOR DAYS. Literally. So we spent the night at the Ibis Styles at the airport after I found a round-a-bout way to Lourdes that involved a Paris-Frankfurt-Toulouse set of flights, plus a train from Toulouse to Lourdes.

Local transportation isn’t an issue, but anything cross-country is a total mess right now. France is emerging from total Covid-19 lockdown and doesn’t yet have the infrastructure in place to handle the travel backlog. It’s not as if everything is jammed with people, but you can tell that people want to get moving faster than anyone thought would happen.

Today at the airport, waiting for our first leg to Frankfurt, is the first it’s kind of felt like we’re in France. First time we’ve had a decent French pastry; that’s probably the real difference. First time Kevin’s got to interact with locals (we took all the pastries a group of middle-aged French women behind us wanted… how could we know their tastes were the same as ours?). Smiles and desoles all around.

The airport. What a mess checking in! HUGE lines at check in, angry people at time, but while the check-in person said my son wasn’t Star Gold (a level of airline status) so he’d have to pay for one of his bags, which I really didn’t have an issue doing but she seemed to think I would, in the end there was no charge because things just weren’t going right for her. Printing issues with the machine that does the bag labels and prints tickets.

We’re going to hit the ground running, hard. No chance for a trial ride; we usually start these trips with a 50 miles shakedown ride up some local mountains, but we arrive in Lourdes at 9:30pm tonight, and catch a train to a far-away stage tomorrow morning 8am. Not much time to settle in! I’d consider skipping that first stage and doing a local ride instead, but that’s not why Kevin’s here; it’s all about le Tour! So le Tour it shall be.

We knew our flight into Paris was going to be late; we didn’t know just how late. By the time we finally left Newark, it was pretty clear there was no way to catch our train from the airport to Lourdes. A flight that I had planned on at least pretending to sleep went completely south; I was up nearly the entire time researching alternatives.

Normally, no biggie, you just take a later train, right? Not in this case; by the time I realized how bad things were, every single train heading to the south of France, via just about anywhere, was sold out for the next two days. And no way to fly to Lourdes; it’s not a very popular airport. The only viable alternative was to find a way to get to Toulouse, and take the 2 hour “local” train from there to Paris.

So I quickly booked an award ticket from Paris to Munich to Toulouse, thinking there’d be enough time (two hours) between flights to get our bags and recheck for the next flight. Well, maybe, if both United and Lufthansa used the same terminal. Nope. United’s in 2E and Lufthansa’s in the galaxy farthest from (2B). The only way it could work would be if I could get our bags transferred directly to the new flight. You can’t call anyone on a plane, so I engaged a United rep on their “chat” facility. A rather useless endeavor because he said he knew the number to call but couldn’t do it himself because the baggage department didn’t do chat. I think there’s another expression for what some at United didn’t do.

So I get all the info together and text my wife and daughter, and they try to call the baggage department. And the recording says hold times are running an hour, and not once, but twice, the line disconnected at about 50 minutes. This is at midnight for them; they needed to sleep, so I did what I could to work things at my end.

There was no way to work things at my end. We landed and got through passport control and discovered the magnitude of the trek from terminal 2E to 2B and with luggage in hand and just an hour before the flight would leave, it was obvious flying to Toulouse today wasn’t going to happen. I rebooked the fight for tomorrow, get a room at the Ibis Styles at the airport, and tomorrow with fly to Toulouse (the long way, via Munich) and then take the train to Lourdes. And Tuesday morning see our first stage, without a day to loosen up our legs.

Three travel days to France is a bit much.