At the start of the project, with the potential for any number of airline problems, Covid risks, navigation trickiness in Medieval European towns and more, I figured I’d not get through all seven trips unscathed. Round #6 turned out to be the one where the shit hit the fan.
I’d really wanted my whole family to meet a wild-man like Sandry and enjoy getting lost amid the Fantasy Island-style narrow streets and ancient buildings of the old section of Le Puy-en Velay. So I set up a junket for seven, including a side-trip to Fez, Morocco, for the final inking in France. The travel arrangements were convoluted and four different itineraries were all supposed to converge in Lyon. Only I didn’t make it.
A connection out of O’Hare was over three hours late—weather in London was wreaking havoc at Heathrow. So I knew I’d not make my flight to Lyon. Neither AA or BA wanted to do anything proactive about my arrangements; that had to be addressed in London.
Which was a madhouse. I waited in line an hour only to be told there were no other flights for the day to Lyon. I didn’t believe it, so I hoofed it over to another terminal and bought a circuitous ticket on Lufthansa. Hoping for something better, I checked online and indeed did find a business-class seat on British, after all. (Guess they didn’t want to comp me a treat like that.) so I canceled Lufthansa and called British to see if they’d cover at least some of the ticket. The agent said he’d work on it and call back. He did, and was happy to report he’d found a coach seat on the very same flight and cancelled my business-class reservation. Excellent! But my bags could have been anywhere — with BA or Lufthansa or in-between.
I waited in line for two hours. An angry mob of largely older, red-faced Englishwomen were about ready to riot; finally at the counter, I was told there was, actually, no seat for me. The coach seat hadn’t been ticketed properly, if at all, and by then my business seat was long-gone… So while everyone else in our group was already in France, I was SOL and going nowhere.
I tried to rent a car—but drop-off in another country wasn’t permitted, so it was to be a night in England. I needed my bag, which had the Kenalog shot; getting it took four hours. After a painfully short three hours in a hotel I had an early flight and finally got to Lyon, where fortunately my friend Charles and his gf were handily ready to give me a lift to Le Puy-en Velay.
Luckily I got to Sandry’s in time for the first session! He came up with a nice idea for linking front and back pieces—ripped skin look—and finished that and the giant shark over two days. Once in a while my kids, or Jaime or Charles and Mary would wander in to watch the progress. I was a bit sad when he was all done--there would be no more inking in France, at least for the foreseeable future. Who knows if I'll ever return to Le Puy-en Velay....
Sandry was amused, as always, with how much self-medication a doc like me was undertaking, as I periodically reached into the medication chest for assistance. I hope he believed the truth that in my own element—my skin job back home—there’s never ever so much as a single Tylenol or drop of beer or anything else inappropriate in my system at work. I couldn’t and wouldn't navigate a day of 70 patients any other way!
We had a couple of excessive evenings, but that tends to happen when I get together with my kids these days. Add a college friend and all bets are off.
On our last night we had a group dinner at a great restaurant. Sandry and Claudine had us try a local aperitif that isn't exported; it was delicious, and reminded me a bit of the liqueur called Saint Germain. Next day we all met at Sandry’s for goodbyes. Jake kept an eye on the clock and reminded us we needed to get back to Lyon to catch our first Moroccan flight. We did have plenty of time, so we dallied a little bit at the studio—I was reluctant to see the French Adventure come to an end.
But there was still a lot of room to make our flight. That is, until we got stuck in our parking lot behind a broken automatic gate. By the time someone showed up to let us out, it was now cutting it very close, and traffic to Lyon was dodgy. We drove as fast as possible in our little, two-car convoy and got to the Royal Air Maroc counter exactly 55 minutes prior to departure. Which, evidently, was five minutes too late. And no other flights for seven people the next few days. We were screwed. There would be no Morocco for us, and everything I'd paid for the trip was flushed down the toilet--no refunds or even credit on the flights or hotel. The tour guides were kind enough to refund most of our payments, but that was it.
We got rooms at the same shitty airport hotel I’d stayed in before, only now it had a different group of soccer-club Euro-thugs playing kiddie billiards on a three-foot, plastic table.
After several, frenzied hours on a dozen websites I ended up booking a road-trip to Lake Geneva in Switzerland: we’d wanted something new, a place none of us had been to (like Morocco), so why not?
It turned out nicely. Top floor digs in a fifteenth-century castle in a vineyard, lots of chocolate, plenty of sights in Montreux and Lausanne, and—the highlight—trips to both the HR Geiger Museum/Bar and Charlie Chaplin’s house and museum.
There was to be no Morocco, which was a big bummer, but do they have any art there showing alien women getting all orifices penetrated by mechanical serpents and feeding tubes? Bet the Fez Medina can’t top that.