3.4 Missing My Flight Home from Paris

The day I missed my flight home from Paris is a day I will never forget. This story involves a train, the French police, a broken escalator, and one broke college student. 

It was a bitter sweet day as I was ending my visit with my best friend who was living in Western France. However, I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed after a long month of backpacking in Europe. My best friend walked me to the train station on a brisk August morning. I hugged my friend goodbye and we hoped we would see one another again sooner than later. How soon, we could not have anticipated. 

I shuffled onto the train as the intercom voiced a series of words and places in a language I could not understand. This would prove to be problematic hours later as we had come to sudden stop just one mile from the airport. Muffled french words came over the speaker and concerned looks dawned the faces of those around me. I had no google translate to assist me, so I clutched my French to English dictionary and bravely walked up to the train conductor to ask what was going on. 

In his broken English and my poorly attempted French, I began to understand a few things. Firstly, the French police decided to do a random security check of the luggage under the train. Secondly, he did not know when they would be done. Lastly, he uttered the words I feared most, "I think you not make flight."

After an hour and a half of sitting on a stopped train just one mile from the Paris airport, we had arrived and my race to catch my flight began. It started with me being dropped off at the wrong terminal, taking an air train where almost every individual got their luggage caught in the doors, and having to run up several broken escalators to get to my gate. 

The doors at the gate are sealed and I see in bold red letters, "Boarding". However, nobody was boarding, and I saw my plane on the tamarack getting ready for take off. With no flight insurance, a whole $50 left in my bank account, and a iPhone 5s, I had to find a plan to get home. After 2 hours of searching for ways to get home while sitting on the floor of a McDonalds in the Paris airport, my friend in Western France reached out. She bought me a train ticket back to her apartment where I would stay for another week until I could find a cheap plane ticket and convince my parents to loan me a few hundred dollars to get back home. 

Rest assured, when I got to the airport that final time, I was there 4 hours early.