As I mentioned before, the cheapest option was IcelandAir, with a connection through Keflavik. IcelandAir (and Iceland in general) are positioning themselves as a logical intermediate stop between the US and Europe. Geographically, it makes sense as a hub. So, it’s off to Iceland again, though only for an hour this time.
I managed to book my preferred seat, exit row aisle where the people in front of me can’t recline into my lap, I have plenty of leg room and a reserved overhead bin (IcelandAir doesn’t allow any items on the floor for takeoffs and landings, so you have to stow everything, so they reserve space for that).
Flight was a little late because the incoming flight was late, but only 20-30 minutes. Though, I only have 1:10 between flights, so this will be tight.
Icelandair is a well-run operation, with polite and professional staff. I appreciate their service. However, I’m not fond of the contractors they have working the gate at BWI. They suck. They are obnoxious, petty dictators with delusions of grandeur. Their regular personnel staff the check-in counter, so I’m not sure why they have these idiots. They are the same crew that worked the gate when Jess and I traveled to Iceland in May.
I filled in the survey they emailed me. I doubt anything will change, but I can hope. Also, it seems unlikely that I will be flying to Europe again anytime soon. Once boarded, everything went smoothly and we landed about 5 minutes after boarding started for the flight to Paris, sigh.
Lucky for me, I knew the way to passport control and back to the outgoing terminal. I had hoped to get a bite of real food for Breakfast and an Applesin (unavailable outside Iceland). Alas, not enough time. Having walked past my gate in haste twice, I was nearly the last person in the queue to board.
This was a completely full 757, and when I booked my ticket, all I could get was a middle seat and not an exit row. So this was going to be a fun three and a half hours. I have no memory of the window seat denizen. The woman in the aisle seat could not sit still. She was in some expensive-looking and voluminous pantsuit (the woman in white on the slide-way in front of me at CDG).
The flight was uneventful, and we were disgorged into the weird concrete doughnut that is CDG. Weird entering a country and not getting asked why the hell I was there and when I would be leaving. But that’s the EU for you, open borders, even for Americans. Now, for my next trip, connecting with Sam. I had prepaid for an eSIM that works in France, so I switched to it, ready to be amazed that it worked. It kind of did. It was passing some data, but not SMS. I guess they consider it cellular, and I bought a data-only plan. Luckily Facebook Messenger worked and he was monitoring. On the way, 10 minutes out, where am I?
Ah…I have no idea. Leaving the plan, I just followed the crowd towards “ground transportation.” It wasn’t that the signage was in French, it was multi-lingual, it was that it wasn’t very informative as to where you were and what your options were.
So, I ended up on a level that has a bunch of transportation options: taxis, rental car counters, buses, etc. Stepping outside, there was a dedicated lane for taxis and an outer pair of lanes for through traffic. No way for those people to get to the curb and pick folks up. I walked around this doughnut for a long way before concluding that regular pickups happen elsewhere.
So, I went back inside and asked a random dude who looked like he worked there where people get picked up. He said level 3. Where am I? Level 5. How did I learn that? I got into an elevator and noted which floor was lit up. Great, hit 3 and it opened to an almost identical vista, but the taxis were replaced with this little lot where people could pull in and pick folks up. As it happens, as I stepped outside, Sam pulled into a parking spot right there. Yay.
Getting out of the lot was an adventure. It’s automated and only lets in as many people as there are spaces. The first 10 minutes are free to encourage brevity. However, the card reader was malfunctioning, and someone was stuck there for several minutes trying to get out. And was serenaded with horns. Like he wasn’t trying already.
So here I am, in Paris. Or really, into crazy heavy Parisian traffic going from the airport NE of the city around past it to the north so we could head out to Cotentin peninsula and Normandy. It was 1300 or so, on a Friday and it seems everyone wanted out of the city. It took over an hour to get past the city and on to the toll road to Normandy. We decided we would have to pad the trip back to account for the potential of this sort of traffic.
After 10-1/2 hours of flying, no sleep and now a four hour drive, it was only the novelty of France that kept me from dozing off. And it was interesting even on a highway. Very little in the way of sprawl. Like Iceland, it’s city and then it’s not. You are quickly in a rolling country side of farms. And we didn’t really see another city after Paris.
First impressions –
It’s hard to compare your impressions, built up over a lifetime, of someplace like France with the reality on the ground. When someone says, France, you think of all the things you know to be there: The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, soaring cathedrals, etc. The reality is, it’s a place. Like any other, for the most part. People live here and do people things. Landing in Paris yesterday, navigating the labyrinthine Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport, and driving out to Normandy was relatively mundane—lots of traffic, construction, and congestion inside the city, and perfectly normal semi-rural countryside outside.
My first experience of France was in 2005, when Jess and I honeymooned in England. We spent one day on a tour of Paris. We caught the train in London at 6 am and went through the Chunnel to Paris. A short bus ride to Ground Zero (the plaza at the Eiffel Tower), where we took a sightseeing boat ride up and down the Seine, followed by climbing the Eiffel Tower. We then had a few hours to explore on our own before catching the bus back to the train station and the train to London.
We spent our time as best we could, went to the Louvre, determined this was not a place you could even scratch in hours, maybe not in days. It’s huge. And it was crowded. We looked around a bit, swam upstream to the far end to see the Italian Masters and the Mona Lisa, and then got out of there. Then we explored the Metro (subway) and took it out near the Arc de Triomphe, where we found the swanky shopping scene along the Champs-Élysées, and had dinner before rejoining the tour to head back to London. What we saw and did was all the stuff you mentally picture when someone says they visited Paris.
This trip has none of that, mainly on purpose. I am here to hang out with my friend Sam and visit the monuments and museums in Normandy dedicated to World War II. Jess and I have long planned to return to France and give it a proper look, during which I would have insisted on at least a few hours in this area. Something Jess would have tolerated, but not enjoyed. Instead, she encouraged me to catch up to Sam on his summer tour of Europe and do Normandy without her. Indeed, spending three days going through the things with someone else who is very into military history will be a lot more fun than trying to see what I want to see while knowing in the back of my mind not to push my wife’s patience too far.
I’ll tour the more touristy spots in a year or two when I come back with Jess. Sam has seen all that stuff already and purposely chooses routes that avoid cities and such, which is fine by me; we have a Plan™. Let’s get on with it.Paris, away from the tourist areas because that’s where you put noisy airports, and on through to the tollway to Normandy, hideous traffic. It took over an hour to clear the city. Then it got rural real quick. There are no sprawling suburbs. It’s a city, and then small farms with small villages sprinkled around.
The roads are nice and well-maintained. The speed limit is a generous 130 kph. There’s no mercy on road signs, though, outside of the usual stuff like stop signs. All the route signs are in French, and you’d better know the names of places on the way. The liberal use of traffic circles and yield signs kept everything flowing smoothly.
We arrived at the Le Sainte Mère Logis Hotel in Sainte-Mère-Église around 2000 to find a rather unimpressive exterior that looked nothing like the pictures on the website—it looked like an old, low-end motel. But inside, all recently remodeled in the latest European style (i.e., high-end IKEA). At less than 100 Euros per night for a king bed, it’s very affordable. Since it was late and we were tired, we ate in the hotel restaurant. The food was good, and it was way more than either of us eats anymore. Then we both crashed.
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