As I write I am sitting in our new home in Western Head, Nova Scotia. It is warm and cozy, and old, and the skies, although different from France, are beautiful, ever changing, and a delight. And of course there is the ocean, and the waves, and the foghorn at the lighthouse.
The journey from Alençon to Western Head was of epic proportions. I swear that France was trying in every way to stop us from leaving.
(A note: we still have an apartment there for the moment. We shall see how things develop.)
To begin, only days before our WestJet flight we came down with COVID-19. Serious COVID-19, which pushed everything back by two weeks.
After rebooking the flight, (bravo to WestJet, and booo to booking.com) and after looking at the options, and after considering how to get two people and a lot of luggage, and a cat, from Alençon to the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris (CDG) we concluded that taking the train to Le Mans, then transferring to the SVG to Paris would be more than our post-COVID recuperative selves could handle. Instead we decided to rent a car and drop it off at the airport.
Except that there were literally no cars to be rented in Alençon for the day that we needed. So I took the train to Le Mans, and picked up a Fiat Topo wagon and drove back.
We loaded up the car with suitcases, Beatrice the cat, and the usual last minute “stuff into a corner” items, and drove to our hotel at the airport.
Right now France is suffering massive fuel shortages. In a nutshell, the workers at French refineries noticed that at the same time that their costs of living were rising, the oil companies were raking in billions of euros in profits, and rewarding their shareholders and executives very, very well. So the workers said “Where’s our share of these newfound riches?” and started striking.
The result is lineups all over France, and stations shut down entirely with no gas or diesel. If you’ve ever rented a car, you know that rule number one is to bring it back with a full tank or pay handsomely to have them do it for you. So once we were checked in at the hotel I set out to buy gas.
If you’ve ever travelled to or from CDG, you’ll know that it is unrivalled in terms of a giant spaghetti mess of roads, roundabouts, overpasses and confusion. It is absolutely incomprehensible to the average driver so I just entered the nearest gas station into Google Maps on my phone and hit “Start.
”
Despite the station being located literally on the other side of the freeway from our hotel - we could almost see it - this turned into a long, confusing, endlessly circling twenty minute drive.
To a gas station that had no gas.
So I entered the location of gas station number two, and took off again. This one was open, but only two pumps out of twelve, and only E95 Ethanol blended gasoline. It took twenty minutes in the lineup, but I got gas and could avoid that challenge the next morning.
I have to note that everyone in these endless lineups was happy, and friendly, and took it in stride. The attitude was one of “Hey, of course the refinery workers deserve more money!”
Up the next morning, load the car again, and off to the airport. Once again trusting Google to get us to the rental car drop off point, which would have been fine except for instructions like “Stay in the Left Hand lane and turn right at the fork.” We wound up going the wrong way (to the right) and could see the drop-off point, and the ramp and signs taking people there, but we did a big loop around Terminal Two back to the beginning. We ignored Google, followed the signs, and found the rental place.
WestJet, in the finest cheapo Canadian tradition, used a gate at CDG which comes very close to not existing. Terminal 2E appears on almost none of the CDG signage, so you need to find an employee to point you in the right direction. It was described as a fifteen to twenty minute walk.
Except that Terminal 2E is one floor up from the rest of Terminal 2D. With a giant stack of luggage, and a cat, the only option was an elevator. Which suddenly just stopped working.
So we gave up that route, and took a different, longer one, to another pair of elevators being monopolised by a tour group, right next door to non-functioning escalator.
We finally battled our way onto the elevators, and made the fifteen minute hike from there to Terminal 2E. We were now very late. This turned out to be a positive because a) there wasn’t time to charge us for our overweight luggage, and b) we had a WestJest staffer to rush us from the check-in to the actual gate for boarding.
Along back pathways behind the check-in lineups, around and about many, many corners, up and down escalators, through French immigration control (bypassing the people lined up) then onto a train! A few minutes later, off of the train, then we hit security.
Throughout all of this we were moving as fast as possible, and somehow kept getting stuck behind a very slow, and dare I say it, not too bright nun. A real nun, in full blue and white habit. Despite jumping the security queue we wound up standing in one place for the better part of five minutes while the nun and her fellow travellers packed, unpacked, repacked, jettisoned liquids, and found every way to move very slowly through security.
We were prepped when we got there: computers out, bags in plastic bins, belts off, cat out of her carrier, coats in bins. We cleared the scanners in no time flat, loaded everything up again and took off for the boarding gate.
Which of course involved wandering though an endless shopping mall full of Gucci and Dior, then another fifteen minutes and five slideways until we arrived at the point where we would be boarding. Thankfully the boarding was delayed ten minutes.
That’s when we realised that we were missing one carry-on bag. The really important document-laden carry-on bag.
Which is why, as the first people started boarding the plane, I wound up running back through the slideways and shopping mall to security, saw our bag, shouted “C’est notre sac! S’il vous plais!” and then ran back the other direction.
The WestJet staff, who were mostly delighting in Beatrice, apparently declared that le mari de Susan was obviously very wonderful.
It was now some time after noon, and my breakfast for the day was a small Snickers bar. And, just to honest, the actual WestJet flight, much less the food, was pretty horrible.
And now we are in Nova Scotia.
I'm sorry but I'm laughing SO hard! The whole thing was absolutely hilarious! My favourite writing bits were about the ALMOST nonexistent WestJet gate, the "to be honest" part about West jet at the end and the "giant spaghetti mess of roads." The entirety, however, had me in stitches! I am thankful you are a writer as can you imagine this entire scenario NOT having been recaptured in words after the fact?!