Day 6

Today has been a very eventful day. We had been told last night that there was an air-traffic controllers strike on. Many flights were affected. David checked about our flight and the advice he was given was that he would be advised by email if the flight was cancelled. There was no email and nothing on the website to suggest our flight to Seville had been cancelled.
We left our beautiful and comfortable hotel in Paris.

20140626-203334-74014134.jpg
We got to the airport and the flight had been cancelled. To add to the CHAOS at the airport a large area was cordoned off and surrounded by the army. A bag had been left unattended and was identified as a potential bomb. It was eventually found to be harmless.
The strike however is not harmless and is on until the 29th June.
The children and I escaped the huge queue that was going nowhere and was apparently for organizing a refund for our cancelled flights. We stopped at Ladurre instead for French toast, coffee and hot chocolate while David fought with the French .

20140627-061845-22725576.jpg

David discovered the only available flight out of Paris to Spain in the next 24 hours was an Air France flight to Madrid tomorrow morning. We have a beautiful hotel booked in Seville for today. We decided the risk of getting to the airport in the morning and experiencing the same event as today was not worth the $6500 for flights plus the cost of overnight accomodation in Paris .

The result of David’s intense negotiation was 3 trains to get to Gare du Lyon ( the TGV station in Lyon). David managed to then get train tickets for us all to Lyon, after being told that the train to Barcelona was sold out. So we winged it to get out of France before the trains went on strike as well ( a real possibility). We got to Lyon about 3.30pm, and then David wrangled some tickets to Barcelona on the last train of the day. His skill in negotiating the language, limited seat availability, strikes and train travel is AMAZING. We got to Barcelona at 11pm. From the train station we got a taxi to the Barcelona Airport Hotel. David had managed to book three rooms for tonight and a flight from Barcelona to Seville at 930am in the morning whilst hooked onto the free wifi in Lyon. This will have us back on our planned itinery by 12md tomorrow. I will let you all know the rest of the story tomorrow……

This entry was posted in Our European Adventure.. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Day 6

  1. Cass George says:

    David Tucker – you are a legend.
    Patience is a virtue!!!
    Well done.
    xc

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.