Paris - Day 5

Today was the day we headed back home to Egg. We felt like we got to see Paris, at least, the things we wanted to see, and I think all of us were ready to have Carsten back in his own room. Our flight left at 12:45 pm, which meant that after we woke up at 8 am (thanks Carsten!), we got ready for the day & packed. Andy and Carsten went out to the bakery to retrieve our final pastry breakfast while I packed, which worked quite nicely. On the way to Paris, we checked one large bag and kept a carry-on suitcase with us just in case our baggage got lost. Since we didn't really care if it got lost in transit (hey - maybe they can wash the dirty laundry!) when we were headed back to Zurich, we decided to check both bags, which meant that packing used the throw-it-all-in-there method.

After we got packed up, we checked out of our dodgy hotel, and headed into the train station to find our train back to the airport. We got lucky and actually found a direct train with no stops to the airport. Carsten was in need of a nap at this point, so I spent most of the train ride trying to put him to sleep, which eventually happened. Once we reached the end of the line at the airport, we hopped off and found that once again, our plane was to depart from the tiniest and most remote terminal. This meant that we had to take a bus out to our terminal, which added 30-45 minutes onto our transit time. This meant that our travel time from our hotel (right on a major train station) to the security checkpoint was about 1.5 hours, which is a bit ridiculous if you ask me. Anyway, we were lucky that we had left ourselves plenty of time and hadn't tried to see anything in Paris that morning, otherwise we probably would not have made our flight.

So, once we checked in and got inside, we got sandwiches and fed Carsten solid food, and then headed to our gate where we were given preferential treatment (go infants and strollers) as we walked onto our plane. Our taxi time was quite long - probably about 30 min, but the flight was short - 1 hr, so it wasn't ideal, but ok. We also realized that the airport times run different here. In the US, a flight time of 12:45 means that the doors close at 12:45, however, in Europe, this means that you board at 12:45 - at least as far as we can tell this is what happened on both of our flight legs. And then they basically add in 30 min to your actual flight time to account for boarding; for example, our flight time was 1 hour, but our listed flight time was 1.5 hrs. Very interesting. Anyway, there were two infants on the plane, Carsten and another little girl who looked to be just a couple of months old. We've noticed that they seem to intentionally group children together, so the other baby was sitting right in front of us. I'm not sure why they do that because children can feed off of one another, but I guess maybe they're trying to make only the people in a close proximity miserable. Which, for the record, neither Carsten or the other infant really cried, so that was quite nice. In fact, Carsten actually slept the entire flight (hooray for Carsten!). I'm coming to realize that the airplane noise is quite good for Carsten, and honestly, as soon as they fire up the engines for take-off he seems to nod off, which makes things easy for Andy and I (at least for short trips).

Anyway, we made it safely back without a hitch and while we spent another 1.5 hrs traveling back to our house (because we missed a train connection), we still felt that we had a good trip and that we enjoy traveling with Carsten. All in all, we loved our trip to Paris, and we are excited about more adventures coming our way!

(No pictures this day - sorry!)