Editor’s Note: Traveling today, early. Communications for the next few could be spottier than Trump’s taxes or Hillary’s emails. There may be some interesting reports from the road. You never can tell.

– Vic

27 DEC 1989.

Up at five alive with energy in the little hotel room and ready for the wild adventure to Orly. I attempt to figure out the manifold mysteries of the Paris Metro and it takes a time or two. Where does the billet go in the ticket machine? Any particular side? And where do you buy the things anyway? No wrong turns leaving the city….but it sure gets weird when you get to Carly le Roi…if I am reading the signs right, that is, an uncertainty factor that looms large. In Japan, there was no hope of reading anything, so I am used to disorientation, but the French makes sense. Almost. I have to detrain and change for Orly Ville and the bus to the airport.

It is pitch black outside, full December in the high latitudes, cold, and graffiti in French covers the walls of the platform shelter and the windows are punched out. It looks like the aftermath of the Battle for Algiers.

I don’t have a good feeling about this and it is almost quarter of six.

Where am I really? I wait another ten agonizing minutes and yet another anonymous train shows up. In desperation I ask a Frenchman if this is the chemin de fer dans Orly. He nods and I get on, hoping…And it works.

One small bus transfer later I arrive, like right on time, only to discover the further mystery of Orly…where is my wife in all this vastness? I wander the corridors of the airport and have my first real language problems. No one can tell me where the arriving passengers come in and the Delta desk is not open yet.

I find the Baggage Claim/Customs area and wait there in the exclusion area hopefully until there isn’t anyone left. Massive depression. Did she make the flight? Did I miss her somehow? I wait at the Delta desk for an hour until the service phone line opens up. I assume that the winter weather in Jacksonville has delayed things. I call Jacksonville but nobody answers.

I finally get through on the phone line to the Delta people…”Yes, she was manifested,” they say, so she must be here somewhere. Where could she have gone?

I finally feel my shoulders slumping in defeat. I decide she wouldn’t still be waiting two hours later, and she must have taken a cab into the hotel to wait for me there. I am drifting disconsolately toward Ground Transportation when I see a cute little blonde in a short skirt.

She had waited right where she was, too, right at the debarkation gate.

Of all things, the French allow you into the country without inspecting your luggage! Weird.

We had both been waiting patiently for hours and only about 100 yards apart. But all’s well that ends well, or at least it begins that way. She looks great in her leather miniskirt. This is going to be great!

I give her pearls from Mallorca and we begin to talk about the Boys and our lives apart. We reverse the trip by train to Paris with a car load of goofy Americans having fun in France.

We arrive at Hotel de Mornay; romance, of course, then bread and cheese (pain et frommage, mon Cher!) in the room and then off for a monumental trek across the world’s 
greatest city. We storm Paris on foot. She has been awake for twenty hours, but she is raring to go.

Once launched, there is no stopping us. But why would they even consider that?

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com