The journey to France
The View from our rental house in Carcassonne - home for the next four months
Our stepped-up journey began early on the morning of December 1st, 2020. Having spent the night before at the Grand Hilton SFO, we arrived at the terminal armed with a mountain of luggage. It had been a whirl wind of a week between receiving our Visa’s, a mad 8 hour drive to Oregon, selling our car, flying back to Santa Rosa, renting an SUV, packing our lives in one day, and arriving at the airport. We managed a few hours of sleep before presenting ourselves at the Hotel shuttle bound for the terminal.
We imagined that immigration once we arrived in France would not be an easy task for these two American boys, never thinking that the hardest part of the journey would be getting on the airplane. Checking in at American airlines was the first hurdle. After handing our tickets and passports to the agent at the check-in counter, she simply looked at the American passports and told us we were not allowed to fly. Phillip showed her our Visas mounted inside of our passports as he told her that we were moving to France and that the Visas allowed us to board the aircraft. Much to the dismay of the other passengers waiting to check in, the agent was not accepting of our ability to fly to Europe as American citizens. She proceeded to begin to make phone calls. After what seemed an eternity the agent came to an understanding that our Visas did indeed allow us to fly and to legally enter the country of France, and we were able to board the first plane from San Francisco to Dallas. In Dallas we experienced round two. At the gate of the last American Airlines flight to Paris (at least until February) we were required to present our negative covid-19 test results and our passports again. The agent began to question our boarding of the airplane and asked for paperwork showing proof that we were moving to France. All we had were our Passports with the French Visas inside. A brief and very awkward moment later, another agent working the counter looked over her shoulder at our visas and proceeded to tell his fellow agent that we were all in order and could board the plane.
We were on our way! Now onto the task of getting into France. Eight and a half hours later we touched down at Charles Chagall Airport in Paris. We were greeted by an American Airlines representative as we stepped off of the airplane into an empty airport. The representative asked for passports and our negative covid-19 test results. She placed a small white sticker onto each of our passports showing that we had presented negative test results, and we were quickly swept into the immigration lines. We have been through immigration at airports many times before, waiting patiently in snaking lines that finally wind their way to a not terribly friendly immigration agent. This was very different. Our flight was the only one in the terminal. We were the only group deplaning. All seventy passengers from our plane were the only ones going through immigration. The majority took a different route intended for French citizens leaving a only a handful of us to face the grim faced agents at the counters. We entered a line and there was only one person ahead of us with the agent, one minute later we were laying our passports on the counter. The agent looked at them with curiosity and picked them up. You could see the confusion in her eyes… American, how did they get here?... Phillip spoke to her in French and said the magic words, the title of our Visa type, ‘Passport Talents”. She flipped the pages to the French Visa, looked at both of us, and in what seemed like slow motion, picked up her really big stamp and stamped each passport. We were through!
In the hall just outside, I kept waiting for something to go wrong, someone to say something, someone to show us to another line, or room, or anything, but it would appear that we were officially and legally in the country of France.
Being the only airplane that had arrived, luggage service was fast, so fast in fact that it was on the belt as we walked into the collection room. We managed to create two smaller mountains out of our mass of cases on two luggage carts and breezed through customs with a wave. Completely mentally and physically (I do not sleep well on airplanes) exhausted we checked into the Hilton at Charles Chagall to spend the rest of the day and the night before picking up our leased car in the morning and beginning our long drive to Carcassonne in the south. Our last hurdle in our journey to France was the concern that all of the luggage would not fit in the leased Peugeot SUV! I am happy to report that with a bit of shoehorning and feeling lucky that we had not brought anymore pieces, the luggage fit and we were on the road!
