As we slept soundly in our cozy Paris hotel room situated in the idyllic area of St. Germain du Pres, there was an announcement being made back in the USA alluding to a complete travel ban coming within 48 hours. Was it a game of ‘telephone’ gone horribly askew or did the announcement blatantly leave out some crucial facts to stir up a bigger mess? Either way jet lag (and pure excitement for another Parisian day) had me waking up at 3:30 am. I regretfully grabbed my phone to check the time – (why do we check the time when we wake up? How is that ever helpful to our sleep?) To my complete surprise, it was filled with over 30 text messages as well as long threads from the WhatsApp groups I have.
“GET HOME BY FRIDAY”
Do I wake Heath? No. Don’t panic. We will either go home or we will stay longer but nothing is happening at 3:30am.
Was it my audible sighs or the light from my phone? Not sure but something caused him to stir and I just blurted out what I knew.
His response to my proclamation stating, “We need to leave now or we might not be able to get home”: “Perfect” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
Ok, maybe it was discussed a bit more, but that is basically the result we both came to before falling back into a deep sleep only waking at 9am again.
I’ll go into more details on our discussions and what the following days in Europe looked like if you are interested, but today I want to share what it looked like as we neared the end of our time in Europe.
(ok, fine. It was a fun alternative to skiing)
Sure ski lifts and mountain trains had shut down all over Zermatt (for those that don’t know our story, we arrived in Zermatt with SEVENTY pounds of ski equipment/gear to find out that we had lugged it all there in vain). But don’t feel too sorry for us – we learned about ‘skinning’ the mountain in true Swiss style and hiked daily to mountain top restaurants rewarding ourselves with delicious beers/views and sledging all the way down. But even with the ‘main’ attraction coming to a halt, the town bars and restaurants were still serving up yummy fondue and sincere hospitality.
It was hard to wrap our head around the urgency to return back to Texas versus enjoying what may be our last big vacation for a while.
Not that we even had a true choice. Delta would not even consider changing our flights unless we wanted to fork over 12 GRAND to fly home early.
FRIENDS – I have never spent $12,000 dollars to GO on a trip. I was ABSOLUTELY not going to be spending even half that to COME HOME from a trip. early.
NOT HAPPENING.
I love Delta Airlines. And I had to trust that they would let me know when it was time to throw in the towel (for free).
That ‘towel’ dropped Sunday when they cancelled our Wednesday flight. After being on hold for over an hour (they had long since done away with the ‘call back’ feature. I assume they were trying to weed out the callers that didn’t have an urgent enough need to sit on an international call for an hour) the lady gave me only 2 flight options:
- Depart on Monday (tomorrow)
- Depart sometime next week (tempting)
We would make our way back to Zurich (while my dad and sister sourced hotels WITH A POOL for our last night before we returned to zee unknown). Zee journey from Zermatt to Zurich is one to ‘zeecus’ later.
Monday morning we traveled by desolate train only to arrive in an equally desolate Zurich airport. It was sad, but also incredibly lovely. Air travel with zero rush, crowds or that ‘pesky general public‘ has me dreaming of my grandmothers old travel photos. Where women wore hats and sipped martinis while boarding flights.
But I can assure you she never encountered the greeting we did as we arrived to check in with Delta:
*Gate Agent holding all our passports and lifting my sons new Swiss ball cap ever so slightly turns to me: “When did you graduate High School” (Is my anti-aging cream working or is this just an interrogation?)
His questioning continues (assuring me his first inquiry was not meant to be flattery): “What do you do for a living in the US”.
Well crap – how do I quickly explain that I mostly raise the kids, help my husband with his business, have my realtors license, do home staging as needed and also dabble in swim lessons during the summers. (Do I share all of this?) *I did*.
Gate agent was done questioning me. No one likes the over-talker.
(Empty Train Station in Zurich)
To Heath the Gate Agent asked, “How old are you” (See Heath – you too should be using a night cream).
“What degree did you get from University”? (Heath now has questions for him. BOLD!).
And suddenly the gate agent says we may proceed with checking our luggage.
Later that morning we would board our international flight with over 200 empty seats. Before takeoff the pilot and flight attendants would both announce that we were departing early and this was Delta’s “Last Flight from Zurich”. Even the crew that flew the plane over were dead heading it back to the USA sleeping in First Class.
But getting off this plane would prove to be the most interesting flight experience I’ve ever had. And you know I’ve spent some time at 35,000 feet. More to come…