The first company or country to figure out how to move large numbers of passengers faster than 500 miles per hour across multiple time zones will enjoy unimaginable success – and win the Nobel Peace Prize.
That's one long trip from Honolulu to Marseille -- about 30 hours from lights on at our home Thursday morning to lights out at our hotel next to the Marseilles Airport. Uncomfortable aircraft seats, no leg room, nonfunctioning reading lights, unworkable entertainment consoles in the seatbacks immediately ahead….all in all, nothing unusual about the trip.
Once again we had reason to swear off Travelocity forever as an online ticketing source. In addition to the company's terrible telephone customer service, let’s just say the last-minute issue about our tickets and how they were issued gave us some fast heartbeats at LAX. Air France personnel there handled the problem quickly, to our great relief.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about air travel to Europe is the huge contrast between airports here and those in America. Charles de Gaulle north of Paris and the Marseille Airport are almost works of art compared to LAX and Honolulu International. We didn’t snap many photos inside CDG, fatigue having temporarily sapped our enthusiasm for photography, but the backlit, no-flash photo Lennie took to show the airport’s TGV station in the background gives a sense of the sweeping architecture there. BTW, bring your walking shoes at CDG; transferring to other flights seems like a major hike.
The Marseille Airport also shows well, and like every other European airport we’ve passed through since ’03, it is exceptionally clean….another huge contrast with stateside facilities. As for those so-called unfriendly and snobbish French, that’s just another myth we Americans love to covet. A young Frenchwoman noticed we didn’t have the 1 euro coin required for the luggage cart and quickly provided one with a smile. (More better is the free cart service at CGD, Zurich and Rome.)
We knew we’d be heading into the heart of Winter by scheduling our trip in January, and that was absolutely clear upon exiting the airport to wait for the shuttle van to the Pullman Hotel (formerly the Sofitel; the name changed in September). It was raining, the wind was blowing and it was cold! And that’s just fine with us. Honolulu’s weather may be the envy of people around the world, but the contrast with the weather here feels good.
Jet lag? This journal entry is being written at 3 a.m., so the answer is yes. But this is a vacation, so that’s just fine, too. Today we pick up the car left at the airport by our home exchange partners, Sandra and Paul Beckett, and then drive to La Jazzine, our exchange villa in the Luberon Mountains about an hour north of Marseille. The Becketts arrive this evening in Honolulu for their stay at our home. This exchange was months in the making, and we can’t wait to get there.
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