Buying tickets to France

I ordered the tickets through google flights in January. My schedule is usually flexible and I like how the google calendar shows the prices for flights on different days. It's a quick way to discover it's cheaper to fly out on a Tuesday and to come back on a Friday without running a search on each day individually and taking notes. The downside is once you've chosen an itinerary you have to buy your tickets from a selection of sketchy airline brokers. I checked each in turn and whittled my choices down to priceline.com and cheapassair.com. Going to the priceline site showed a massive inline image of William Shatner. It was so tacky I closed the tab and purchased the tickets from the more professional looking site with the horrible name of cheapassair.

As we travelled from airport to airport, every time we were asked for our purchase information I was surprised to see we were in their computer. Even up to the last flight home I was sure they were going to tell us our tickets were invalid but every time they seemed to say, "Yes sir, cheapass air vouches for you, come on through."

Before we left I bought a gopro and Amanda bought a new sleeping bag. Here's some pictures of her trying them out at the store.

00:30 (7.6MiB)

Crossing the Atlantic

At 6am we left the apartment to the cat and the bird to walk downtown and catch the shuttle to San Francisco. The walk took 35min and the shuttle arrived early. Traffic was heavy through San Jose and we stopped on the freeway a few times.

Airport security leaving the US was surprisingly reasonable. I don't know if it was because it was an international flight (kicking out dirty foreigners) but we didn't have to take off our shoes, submit to dubious full body scans, or remove electronics from our bags. We also didn't have to power off our electronics during the flight. It was all surprisingly rational.

We flew air Canada from San Francisco to Montreal and from there to Nice. The flight across the US took about 5 hours and arrived so late there were no open gates. We stopped on the tarmac and after a while the pilot turned off the engines while everyone squirmed in their uncomfortable seats and checked their watches. Despite the fact we were only passing through, we had to fill out and turn in customs forms and get our passport stamped before catching our connecting flight.

By some miracle we got onto the next plane. When we got to the gate the boarding was over and there were only a few airline attendants standing around the open door. I was certain we'd have to spend the night in Canada.

It was raining in Montreal and this was surreal to a Californian currently going through a 1000-year drought.

On the flight to Montreal there were television screens fixed to the seats in front of us only a few inches from our noses. They played unskippable commercials and I cursed the marketers that think it's OK to abuse a captive audience and everyone else that puts up with it.

Thankfully there was no compulsory capitalism on the flight over the Atlantic but there was less leg room. Our seats were in the very back of the plane, next the bathrooms, and behind a tired women with three cranky toddlers. They served us a free meal and I tried to twist around in the tiny seat to catch some sleep.

After spending nineteen hours in the dry air, I had a headache and was feeling nauseous. I didn't finish the free meal and the last hour was spent rearranging the barf bag in the seat pocket in front of me and keeping track of the people going in and out of the bathrooms so I knew which one was free.

They spoke English when we left, a mix of French and English as we approached Montreal, and more French as we crossed the Atlantic. It seemed everyone on the flight was bilingual.

Amanda mocked me when I expressed surprise that they let us on the plane with our cheapass tickets. Our printed itinerary showed an incorrect total flight time but we could figure it out from the time difference. Nice is 9 hours ahead of California. We got up at 5am and arrived in France at 10:30am local time the next day. 10:30am is 1:30am our time which means we were on the move from 5am to 1:30am - about 20 hours.

Early in the morning we were flying over the Atlantic. The windows were bright but the lights were off and people were wrapped up in blankets trying, without success, to get some sleep. The constant drone of the engines and the smoothness of the flight cast a surreal light on the situation.