Planes, trains and....Uber?

Well, we sadly started the long trek back home today.  Being in the south of France, living in a city without a major hub and using frequent flyer tickets all lined up to give us 4 flights to make it home.  Marseille to Paris, Paris to JFK (overnight in hotel), JFK to Dallas and Dallas to Sacramento.  The tickets were basically free, so it's hard to complain.  It would have been 3 flights no matter what.  The surprise came when we headed to the airport this morning.

We all have different stress points and Anne has learned leaving a foreign country is one of mine.  I travel so much internationally and have had so many issues I always get to the airport 2 hours ahead minimum.  She offered up to leave the hotel early before I could bring up the subject, so I figured we were good.  Drive was fine and we pulled into the Marseille airport area just over 2 hours ahead and found about a 2 mile backup out the front entrance to the airport.  We had heard that taxi drivers were protesting Uber drivers in Paris, but apparently they moved to Marseille and were blocking the entrance to the airport.  See the CNN article about Paris below.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/25/europe/france-paris-uberpop-protests/

Here was Anne's cell phone shot as we passed through the protest line.

If we missed the first flight, it was going to be a REALLY bad and long weekend.  You are basically standby on whatever is available and that can be a rough trip home.  I was fortunately able to squeeze in at the end of the line, by driving on the shoulder and forcing my way in the end.  I felt a little bad, but we would have missed the flight otherwise and a month of driving in Europe has honed my aggressive driving skills.  After slowly crawling through the crowd of taxi drivers blocking the way, we were there in about 45 minutes (just to get into the airport drive).  We dropped the car and were at the area to check in 1.5 hours before our flight, so we figured we were good.  Not so fast, we forgot we were in France.  There were 5 people checking in the long line of flyers, and all of a sudden, 4 of them left for about half an hour.  We waited in that line nearly an hour before we got checked in.  Fortunately we made the flight (barely) and are in Paris airport waiting for our flight to the US.    To quote Yogi Berra, "it isn't over, until it's over", but we are hopeful that things will be smoother from here.