I had it all planned out perfectly. Our plane would land at Charles de Gaulle International Airport at 8:30am. Our next flight wasn’t set to take off until 6pm. This would give us about five hours from the time we could leave the airport until the time we needed to be back. It was the perfect way to give my mom her first glimpse of Europe.
Our plane landed on time and we scuttled through customs and immigration with the rest of the arriving passengers, like a bunch of ants. During my pre-trip planning, I had figured out where we could leave our carry-on bags, just near where we’d catch the train into the city.
Everything was all well and good, until we actually had to navigate our way across CDG to the trains. The first roadblock was our limited knowledge of French. I believe the number of words we know—combined—could be counted on one hand. This made finding the luggage storage area twice as difficult as it would have been had we been in an unfamiliar airport where everyone spoke English. After waiting for people to [not] help us, and finally figuring out where to store our bags, we found the train into the city and were on our way.
Our first stop was the Arc de Triomphe, since I wasn’t able to see it during my first visit to Paris, a year and a half ago. We found our way there with no issues; we were both simply excited to be standing in the city of light.
We made it to the Eiffel Tower, our second stop, via Uber, and I dug out my camera to take some pictures of my mom in front of the iconic landmark. Of course, yet another thing went wrong, and an error message appeared on my camera when I snapped the first photo: “This memory card cannot be used. Card may be damaged Insert another card.”
Thankfully there were a plethora of souvenir stands about 10 feet from us, and of course they carried SD cards. Lesson learned: always pack a spare SD card. Backup plan: check souvenir shops.
It took use a while to find wifi near the Eiffel Tower, since there aren’t any cafes placed immediately next to it. So we took a brisk, stressed-out stroll across one of the bridges over the Seine, found some random wifi while walking along the river, and caught another Uber to Notre Dame.
Notre Dame is one of my favorite European Cathedrals. I’m not sure if it’s because I grew up watching the animated version of it in a Disney movie, but even though this wasn’t the first time I had seen the cathedral, it took my breath away again.
After snapping a few pictures, we made Mom’s Paris dream a reality: we had lunch at an outdoor café. Without cell data, I couldn’t use TripAdvisor to find the best restaurant in the area, so we settled for a [pretty touristy] café with a table that had a perfect view of the cathedral. (Full disclosure: I wouldn’t normally advise anyone to eat just anywhere without doing a little research, or at least looking around at your options first, but when Mom has only one thing to check off her list in Paris, you make sure it gets done.)
I’m a pescatarian, so I found something that worked for me on the menu, and since most of the menu was in French, it was easier to just order two of the same thing, rather than try to decipher the other menu items (still without cell data).
After we scarfed down our quiche, we tried finding wifi again to grab an Uber back to the airport, but to no avail. We spotted a taxi and jumped in, glad that we had brought some of our Euros with us.
Our taxi driver was very friendly, and knew a good amount of English, which made for an equally good amount of conversation. We talked about California, Shakira, Trump, and what was causing all of the ill-timed traffic on the way to the airport—French strikes. The driver put it this way:
“We French will strike for any reason. Election time? Strike. Someone decides they should get better pay? Strike. Trump is president in the U.S.? Strike. There is always a strike going on for no good reason.”
Luckily, this strike didn’t completely block off our route to the airport, and we were able to make it to our terminal with enough time to grab our bags from where we had stored them, get through security, and get to our gate.
Or so we thought.
We made our way to Left Luggage, the baggage storage vendor at Charles De Gaulle, and were abruptly stopped by a beret-wearing guard, AK-47 in hand. He sternly said something to us in French, we looked at him puzzled, and pointed to the baggage storage and said, “but our bags…?” He just shook his head at us and moved on to give someone else his “none shall pass” statement. We asked people if they knew what was going on, and no one (who spoke English) had a clue.
Then my mom, in her mom way, yelled out “DOES ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH AND FRENCH?!” One man raised his hand, “I do…” Through this bilingual blessing of a fellow traveler, we were able to find out from the guard why no one was allowed to pass him.
Someone left an unattended bag in that section of the airport.
So we power-walked back to the check-in counter (a good .4-mile walk—thank you Apple Watch) and asked what we should do since no one had any clue when passengers would be able to retrieve their luggage. The AirFrance and Alitalia staff at the counter were of no help. And we power-walked .4 miles back to Left Luggage.
We almost cried tears of joy when we arrived back at Left Luggage and the armed beret-wearing soldier was nowhere in sight, and people were bustling around again, not being told where they could or could not go. We quickly picked up our carry-ons and power-walked—yet again—back to check-in.
After jumping through the hoops of check-in, security, etc., we plopped into a couple chairs near our gate, completely exhausted from the days’ events.
One of my favorite designers, Michael Kors, said it best:
“You never forget your first trip to Paris.”
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