We’re back from Paris, not particularly happy, moderately jetlagged. A nice flight somewhat ruined at the end by the failure of the jetway operator at SFO to come back from his break on time, resulting in us all standing on the plane after an 11-hour flight for an additional 30 minutes until a replacement jetway operator could be found (something that I could see happening at 2 a.m. but not really acceptable at 11:30 a.m.), followed by grinding, slow lines at the U.S. passport and customs control; all in all it took us over two hours from the time we got to the gate until the time we got out of the airport.
One very cool part of the trip has to do with the “Great Circle” route that a plane takes when flying from Paris to San Francisco. Because that route goes so far to the north, where the number of daylight hours in the middle of winter are very small, we experienced the oddity of starting out in bright sunshine in Paris, flying for a while in daylight, then watching the sun gradually “set” and eventually go back down below the horizon again for a long time, eventually leaving us in almost complete darkness, before seeing the sun “rise” again as we came further south. This picture, which I took en route of the map showing the plane’s progress, shows how the “Great Circle” route skirted the edge of light-dark boundary (you have to imagine the “hump” being further to the right when we started).
This strange day-night-day phenomenon did nothing to help us try to reset our clocks to Pacific time, and by the time we got home and (relatively) unpacked (on a “couple” basis, Suzie 100%, me 20%), our bodies were telling us it was very, very late (and we’d had to get up at 4:30 a.m. in Paris, as we had to do final packing and cleaning in our apartment before getting a cab to the airport at 6:30, which made things worse).
It’s back to the routine tomorrow, but this trip has convinced me and Suzie that we very much want to live in France, at least part-time, as soon as we both fully retire, and that the date of that “full retirement” perhaps should be moved up a few years. We’ll see.
Categories: France, Travel -- France