CarlaVisitAgain Day 8: Departure and Decompression

After a night of partying, I got home around 6h00 and got ready to take Carla to the airport. I picked her up from her room and we headed over to the métro station. After the nightmare of her departure last time, we were determined to leave terribly early and avoid any potential problems.

Mercifully, there were no problems on the métro or the RER, so we got there by about 7h30 and headed over to her terminal. Once we got to the Air Canada checkin, the person at the desk told us that checkin for the Toronto flight wouldn't start until 8h30, which meant that we were looking at about 1 hour of waiting in line on our feet. While I got in line and waited with her luggage, Carla "worked the system" by going over to a set of self-serve checkin machines to print out her boarding pass. When the machine didn't print out her connecting flight to London, Ontario, Carla went to a service desk nearby and inquired about it. At first, the woman at the desk declared that Carla's connecting flight had been cancelled, and she wasn't listed for the Toronto flight. This was despite the fact that Carla had a boarding pass for Toronto in her hands. After several minutes of confusion, the woman discovered that the ticketing system had automatically dropped Carla from her Toronto flight when her London flight was cancelled (which is the stupidest thing ever), so the attendant quickly added her back to the flight (thank goodness we were here early!) and gave her tickets for another connecting flight to London.

From there, we headed over to the luggage drop-off, where the man at the desk protested that he couldn't take her luggage before 8h30. This seemed silly, so I played up Carla's sciatica and told him that we had come so early precisely to avoid forcing Carla to stay on her feet for hours. After a bit of quibbling, we got his permission. The woman at the actual drop-off counter put up similar resistance, but the "my sister is gimpy" line of argumentation worked again.

With her bags finally dropped off, we headed to a nearby café and ate our final batch of Hermé macarons along with some coffee and some rather underwhelming coffee cake. After that, I deposited Carla off in the security line and headed back home to crash. The entire ride home, I had to struggle to keep from falling asleep and missing my stop. Not even really loud music from my iPod helped. By the time I got home, however, I had woken up and needed a little while surfing the net before my body began to shut down again. By noon, I was finally asleep.

I woke up around 17h30, still horribly tired, and decided that today was not going to be a productive day. I grazed on some cheese and salad, watched music videos on YouTube (including this and this and this).

Oh, and here's some pictures I took during Carla's visit. I don't think they need much explanation, but feel free to post questions in the comments.