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poor food choices at the Orly gate
Sunday, October 30 2016
Room 36.18, Radisson Blu Hotel, 3rd Arrondissement, Lyon, France
As Gretchen checked us out, I tried to make myself some coffe with the robot coffee machine in the lobby. But after loading a cartridge into the right place, none of the buttons did anything. And then when I opened it up, it threw the unused cartridge away. And then when I put another in, it fell immediately into the waste cartridge collector. I'd had enough of that and just walked away. Maybe everybody in France knows how to use such machines, but I can tell you they're not intuitive.
We'd been thinking we could take a train to the airport early this morning, but then we looked at the train schedule and saw there were no trains in middle of the night. So we'd have to take a cab instead. The price for such a cab was 70 euros, which is a fortune. But there was no other option. The cabby was waiting for us as we came bleary-eyed out of the elevator. He was driving a nice car; evidently the Radisson works with top-end cabbies. As expected, there was no traffic on the road to the airport, and we got there in only about twenty minutes.
There was no taking off of shoes as we went through security in the Lyon airport, though I was a little anxious because I had no paper boarding pass and was depending on a QR code displayed by my phone to get me through the places I needed to get through. But my cheap Samsung smartphone wasn't proving bright enough for the airport equipment to read. I'd been assuming all along that its weak light output was a consequence of its cheapness. Then I discovered that all along I'd had the damn thing set at half brightness. Doh!
Our plane rose up out of the low later of stratus clouds and was immediately basking in the golden light of the sun. Below us, that bank of clouds hugged the surface like a thick blanket of snow with here and there a small brown mountain or ridge poking through. Meanwhile, off in the east, the jagged peaks of the Alps made for the roughest surface of that scale I'd ever seen.
Closer to Paris, the carpet of cloud dwindled away and I could survey the French landscape for its many nuclear plants, each producing a streamer of cloud drifting upward and in the direction of the prevailing winds. In addition to electrical power, they were producing little bands of weather.
Our destination in Paris was the Orly Airport, and once we landed there, we had to go through security all over again in order to go to the gate for our international flight to JFK (though I still don't think we had to remove our shoes). In one or both of these French airports, we noticed an ingenious invention in use: a belt-fed system operating in the opposite direction from the conveyor belt feeding luggage through the xray machine. It was located in a lower layer, and its job was to return trays from people who had just used them to people who needed them. This system seemed to work so efficiently that many fewer trays were actually in use. But as with all great European ideas, America will surely never adopt such a system, because, like socialized medicine, it just doesn't work in America. We're exceptional like that.
Security dumped us in a small area shared by only a few other gates, a few minor concessions, and a bathroom. Gretchen, who had been hoping we'd have access to real restaurants behind security, soon realized we were trapped in an area with almost no vegan options. There was a Relay store that sold nuts and chips, and there was a coffee place that sold pre-made sandwiches (all of which contained meat, cheese, or both), and that was it. Gretchen went to inquire as to what might be done to suit our peculiar cruelty-free dietary needs and the coffee guy proved himself to be a complete asshole. I later went and got myself a double espresso, and he was perfectly nice to me. Lacking other options, were were forced to dig into provisions we'd bought yesterday at Un Monde Vegan. The shrink-wrapped croissants were good enough for me, but Gretchen found them too terrible to eat. As for the cheese, well, it really wasn't that great. But when you're hungry and stuck in tiny airport food desert, what the hell else can you do?
As we boarded our plane (a big jumbo jet with seats in coach arranged in a 3-4-3 pattern), various people were randomly pulled out of line to have their shit gone through with special attention. This included the young woman with very unnaturally-colored hair. Gretchen and I, on the other hand, have apparently arrived at middle aged invisibility, and there was nothing between us and our seat.
Again, we were faced with the delightfully anachronistic experience of being on a plane that was far from full. This flight was maybe two-thirds full, and we kept wondering if the third seat in our three-seat cluster was going to be taken. Gradually the people boarding the plane dwindled to a trickle. And then the doors closed. Yes, that seat was going to be ours! Having been reminded of its existence recently, Gretchen and I decided to queue up the famous Harrison Ford vehicle The Fugitive and watch it simultaneously. This worked for a time. But then our special vegan meal came and my ambien kicked in, and all kinds of shit went to hell. I remember eating that meal as a series of disconnected snapshots. There was me, beefing up the bland rice & vegetable combo with chunks of seitan "wings" and bits of a hot pepper I'd taken from the buffet island of the Scenic Sapphire. And then there was another frame with a spectacular necktie of food that had dribbled out of my mouth and down the front of my sweater. Gretchen has occasionally seen me when I've mixed alcohol and ambien, and there's nothing sexy about it. Fortunately, all of this allowed me to pass at least three hours of the flight in a non-conscious state. I was, however, awake and conscious for most of the flight once we'd reached Newfoundland.
Once landed and deplaned, Gretchen and I ran as fast as we could around the others trudging towards Immigration. It's alwasy important to beat the rush of your particular plane. We got through Immigration in about ten minutes, and customs was even faster. They saw our backpacks and waved us in, saying "Welcome back." That's really kind of sweet.
Gretchen did all the driving back from JFK to Hurley, and it was still daylight when we arrived. Remember, we'd lifted out of Lyon in golden light of the rising sun.
We greeted our dogs and cats while Betty stood around smiling. She'd done a great job, but she's a bit of a weirdo. She mentioned, for example, two occasions where she may have left the wrong impression with either Gretchen or our friend Nancy, and these incidents had been gnawing at her. Our return gave her a chance to clear the air. But the issues came to nothing at all. The only really bad thing that happened during her stay was that a strong wind had caught the umbrella over the table on the east deck and managed to tip over the table and smash its glass surface, leaving a pile of little glass cubes. Betty, knowing we'd be hungry, had cooked us a hearty dumpling stew. It needed some salt and hot pepper, but once it had that, it was exactly what I wanted to be eating. After debriefing us on all these things, Betty headed off to her next destination; she'd be spending the night with her nephew, the guy who now runs the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary in High Falls.
A view down the Radisson Blu's atrium towards the lobby in Le Pencil this morning. Click to enlarge.
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