poetrybyheart.me

The time had come to say good-bye to Cannes. We arrived early at the airport in Nice and boarded our flight to Paris. The plane flew above the Alps whose snow-covered peaks were poking up above the clouds in full sunshine. It was a gorgeous sight! When we landed at Orly Airport in Paris we learned that our next flight was four hours late. We bought a Travel Scrabble game and settled down to play Scrabble and wait. Once airborne again we flew only one hour to London and had another wait of an hour-and-a-half. Finally we headed out over the ocean and began our seven hour trip to New York. We had been up since midnight according to the time zone at home. Except for three hours of darkness at the end, there was daylight our entire trip home. We continued to play Scrabble all this time – one game, which I lost.(When we went through customs we had only our Scrabble game and three Match Box cars we had bought in England for our sons to declare. I still have the Travel Scrabble game in its original box with the sales slip from Orly Airport and the piece of paper we kept score on for our marathon game. There is only an”e” tile missing.)

When we landed in New York we had long since missed our flight home. We hurried through customs and found that we might be able to make the last flight out to our destination that night. However there was a problem, we couldn’t find a bus or taxi to take us to the terminal on the other side of the airport to catch the flight. We were determined to get home that night so we just picked up our baggage and ran across a grassy field to the terminal. The flight was sold out and we were put on stand-by with only fifteen minutes until the plane was to leave. All the other people were still waiting for the shuttle bus and missed the flight so got seats – just in time. By midnight we were home. We had been travelling twenty-four hours with only three hours of darkness. It took me two days after I got home to know where I was when I waked up in the morning. I even dreamed in French which was most disconcerting since I didn’t know what the people were saying.