Year 3 Day 363 “Living the Dream”. Monday, 4/29/2024. Day 28 of 28-day European Vacation. Traveling from Massy, France to Science Hill, KY. Our last dinner out in France last night was early and quiet. We needed to be up, packed, showered, eaten, checked out of the hotel, and out on the sidewalk by 7am to meet our Uber car this morning.
We walked back to our hotel after dinner and had to stop and admire this tiny car. Perfect size for me to zip around town. Look how easy to park. I can’t imagine Steve driving one of these. Imagine no parallel parking?
Then the last smell of the fresh bakery on the corner, I am going to miss walking around this town.
We headed to breakfast at 6am and the breakfast area is packed. There is a group from LA leaving the hotel on a coach bus. Here’s a video of room 719 at the Hilton Garden Inn, Massy, France.
This hotel is South of Paris and about 28 miles to the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. We had an uber pick us up at the hotel at 7am figuring it was usually a 40-minute drive. It is Monday morning at 7am so Roissy-en-France Traffic is horrendous with many accidents. It took us almost two hours to get to the airport. Our Uber driver was wonderful. I love France and the way they stamp your passport. We have not been to any other country where our passport has been stamped every time we went through customs. Steve was randomly picked for searching before boarding. He did get to board with priority seating because of it. I was in group 5. We flew on an American Airlines Boeing 777-200ER from Paris CDG airport to Dallas. The flight was 10 hours and 5 minutes. The 777-200ER is the world’s largest jet and has the largest landing gear of any commercial aircraft type. The ER stands for Extended Range. This plane carries 368 passengers. The twinjet engines of the Boeing 777 are equivalent to 175,000 horsepower. Pilots can accelerate this plane from 0 to 96 km/h in just 6 seconds. The engine is listed as the most powerful jet engine in the Guinness Book of Records. Flying really S***S. After 10 minutes I am already thinking, Are we there yet? We took off at 11:35am. First, they served little bags of pretzels. Then they served drinks (alcohol and non-alcohol). Coffee for me. Then lunch came. I had the pasta, and it was excellent. Steve had the chicken which came with spinach and yellow rice. It was good also. Very surprising meals and very happy with American Airlines. They also served crackers with laughing cow cheese, a salad, a roll, and a brownie cake. Steve ate the rolls and cakes. I guess they were good. Excellent cheese, crackers, and salad. You can’t go wrong with laughing cow. Then they came with ice cream. Interesting it was really hard. They must have good freezers. I am feeling like a penned up stuffed goose. Six hours into the flight it started to get pretty rough. We were really bouncing around. I was feeling pretty stressed. It might have also been the coffee I have been pounding down. To make myself feel better I looked up statistics on flying and found that at any given time, there are between 8,000 and 13,000 airplanes in the air. Over 30,000 flights with two million passengers on board take off every single day in the United States alone. Well, I was thinking that would calm me but no. So, I started counting down the time till we land in Dallas. That didn’t seem to help either. We have to take a smaller plane to Lexington from Dallas. I also looked up safety for this plane. Nope, I am not even going into those statistics. Blocked that information right out of my brain. The closer we get to Dallas the more turbulence we encounter. Of course, our altitude is dropping so you usually do encounter more turbulence, I think. Then one hour from Dallas they suspend service because the captain says it will be too bumpy from here out.
We land in Dallas safely and if it wasn’t for global entry, I don’t think we would have made our next flight. What a difference in planes. Only smaller planes fly into Lexington.
23 hours later we are back in Science Hill, Kentucky. The good old USA took us back. We now get to see Koral graduate.
Things to ponder today! Have to leave you thinking.
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To view the complete daily diary, click here – This starts at Year 1 Day 1: Living the Dream – Deestimes – Make every step of the journey count