France in Autumn! What could be better? Slightly cooler weather. Less tourists, and more time to explore on our own for a long stretch of time. We have been looking forward to this trip since we booked it last Christmas when we were on the Viking Grand European 15 day Christmas Market’s river cruise. We used to travel in September every year, but now that we have George (our camper) and its still a nice time to golf, we’re now pushing out big European and cruise travel plans until October. If you are a loyal blog reader you will remember my post “How many September’s” since my dear, recently deceased wise mentor and friend Ron Porter used to use that term. How many September’s do we actually have to travel while we are still in good health after we’ve retired? Well we are changing it up this year and probably for the foreseeable future and calling it “How many October’s?”
We had a friend from our golf club in Fort Erie bring us over the river to Buffalo Airport yesterday and after a very smooth check in with the Delta Sky Priority team, we found ourselves upgraded to First Class on the short leg of our flight from Buffalo International Airport to New York’s JFK airport. Having status on Delta has been nice, but we have not travelled enough this year to retain our status for next year unfortunately!
That look of excitement to be travelling again!
With lots of time to spare before our flight we headed to the Priority Lounge at Bufffalo Airport. The lounge is quite small, but the food and service is always great and we were able to secure a nice table for two airside so Richard could watch the planes taking off and landing (his favorite pastime). When my dad was alive and worked at Toronto’s Pearson International airport as Manager of Maintenance and Engineering of the entire Pearson airport his very spacious office overlooked the apron of the terminal, where he would watch planes all day long!, I’m not sure how he ever got anything done! Richard and my dad definitely bonded over their love of airplanes!
Boarding in Buffalo
We arrived at our gate and were very happy to board in Zone 1 on the small RJ aircraft bound for NY. The steward was hilarious and wanted to make us each a specialty cocktail of our choice for the flight. It’s always nice to see people having fun with their jobs in the hospitality industry!
Landing in New York, New York.
Our steward advised us when we arrived at JFK to “go left, past the escalator and the washrooms and catch the bus to Terminal A to Terminal 4. We found the bus stop, but since the bus wasn’t coming very fast, we elected to walk to Terminal 4 which we were told would take us 20 minutes to get to our B25 gate. I’m not sure who would ever take 20 minutes to do that walk, but we sure didn’t, doing it in about 10 minutes!
Equal billing…
Chocolate anyone?
I got Richard settled at the gate while I went to wander around the terminal. There sure are some interesting things for sale at JFK airport!
My face says it all…flight delays for Duty Free!
We boarded the Delta flight to Nice right on time at 5:20pm and found our Delta Comfort+ seats that we had purchased. After last year’s debacle of flying Virgin economy from Heathrow to Tampa after our Viking River cruise I said we would never fly economy on long haul flights again. Lesson learned!
Our flight was to take off at 6:15pm but we were delayed until 7:30pm because many people never got their Duty Free delivered to the gate before they boarded the flight. Since there was more than one person impacted, the entire flight got delayed 1 hour and 15 minutes waiting for Duty Free!
We were starting to get quite hungry since we had expected we would be eating as soon as we took off. Finally we got our dinner around 8:15pm and as I ate dinner I started tracking the Kansas City Chiefs vs the New Orleans Saints NFL football game with the Delta wifi. It was nice to see KC get an early lead in the game with a touchdown and never relinquish their lead during the game. 5-0 KC! What a dominant start to the season!
Our home in Florida is in Plant City
In between checking the football game score, I was also checking the status of Hurricane Milton which is heading towards Florida and our home in Plant City, Florida on Wednesday. We pray the storm will disapate and both our home and our neighbours and friends homes will be spared in Florida.
I tried to sleep but frankly I’m not a good napper and if the seat doesn’t lie flat, I have a hard time sleeping on it. I think I did doze off for a bit, but it wasn’t a comfortable, long sleep by any means.
Richard always keeps the flight path on his tv screen. We started to get some turbulence with about an hour left in the flight and Richard then says “Of course we’re going to get turbulence we are heading for 90km/hr winds! Just then the plan started with the bouncing up and down and the side to side motion from the heavy winds. I DO NOT LIKE RIDES and I DO NOT LIKE BAD TURBULENCE! Richard is sitting next to me very calmly saying “Planes are made to withstand this kind of weather”. Just then I see a flash of lightening outside my window. AH!!!! I started deep breathing. Then I started to sweat. I finally ended up grabbing the air sick bag and breathing into it. I was really not feeling well. I just wanted this awful plane ride to be over! The Captain came on the intercom and said that the flight attendendants would not be coming through the aisles to do their final clean up of the cabin. You know when you hear that, that its going to be bad all the way until we land! I kept asking Richard “How much longer” as the relentless winds pushed our plane from side to side and bumping up and down. We finally broke through the low, grey ceiling and had a very bumpy landing into Nice Airport. The runway was wet and it looked like miserable day in Nice.
The next delay we had was due to the fact that there was no one to work the jet bridge to be a ble to get off the plane. After waiting about 15 minutes, finally someone came and linked the jet bridge to our plane, so we could disembark. I of course needed to use the restroom so luckily there were not too many people in front of me waiting to use one of 3 stalls in the first restroom we came to.
The Immigration/Passport control was a further delay with only 1 automated lane working for people from Canada, and USA, and some other NON EU countries. As the man in front of me attempted to use the automated lane for passport control, the system shut down and he had to go to a live person to complete his check in. We followed along and did the same thing having a nice chat with the immigration officer about Richard marrying an ‘anglophone’ when he was bilingual.
After the delays in getting off the plane, waiting for a restroom and waiting to get through immigration, our suitcases had arrived on the conveyor belt! So we had one less thing to wait around for! I still wasn’t feeling too well after that bumpy plane ride.
Richard went to airport information to inquire where he could catch an UBER to our condo in downtown Nice. Richard quickly connected to the airport’s wifi and I turned on my eSIM Orange phone plan that I had purchased before I left home. After updating his UBER app he was able to summon a Tesla Model Y to come and get us.
Our luggage all fit in the Model Y and we got in the UBER for the short 14 minute drive to our condo. The rain was coming down sideways as we left the airport but our UBER driver assured us that the rain was supposed to stop by 2pm today.
Our UBER driver dropped us off near our VRBO condo thinking that since we had time to kill we might want to sit in a cafe and wait to get into our condo to drop our luggage at 11am (we had about an hour to kill). We decided to walk with our luggage and find the actual condo building (having to stop at a store to ask which building we were staying at since it wasn’t actually numbered on the building).
UBER driver punching in the address of our condo since he said the address Richard punched in did not work
The rental agent for the VRBO owner finally arrived at 11:10am after we had let ourselves into the condo to wait in the very uncomfortable chairs in the building’s lobby. He apologized for being late but he said that after he got his daughter off to school, the school called and said he had to come and pick her up since there was a ‘tornado warning’ in effect for Nice and the schools were closing for the day!
WOW! We sure can’t escape the weather! With the hurricane in Florida, the horrible thunderstorm on our descent into Nice, the torrential rain when we landed in and now a Tornado warning? That’s Global warming for you! Crazy, unpredictable, unexpected weather!
And right on queue as 2pm arrived, the sun tried to break through the clouds and the weather really improved in Nice to 21C (70F).
Richard is napping and I feel a nap coming on. I usually do take a quick nap when I get to Europe, just to get on the right time zone and quickly get over the bad night’s sleep on the flight over.
Lunch! Our condo even had a fresh basil plant that I could use on my baguette sandwich!
We’ve found our local, everything we could ever need Monoprix grocery store and we picked up a few things to eat for lunch. A bigger grocery shopping trip will have to wait until we both have a ]ittle more energy.
Nice awaits…but first a nap and to check the status of the hurricane in Florida.
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