I have flown my fair share of sketchy airlines.

There was YetiAir in Nepal, where landing in Lukla you are treated to the sight of former Yeti Air parts from planes that did not quite stick the landing. Air Zimbabwe where the pilot and copilot locked themselves out of the cockpit and had to use the bar from the coat rack to break back in (this was pre-9/11, thank god!) and our most recent touch-and-go situation with Ethiopian. None of these airlines left as bad a taste in my mouth as EgyptAir did on our flight from Addis to Cairo to Paris. There were no near misses or breakdowns or even lost luggage. There were just a LOT of men, airline employees, who treated me and my daughter like we didn’t exist, couldn’t answer questions for ourselves or, if we insisted on answering, needed to have our answers verified by a male traveling companion. Holy hell I was a hot mess of rage as the ticket taker refused to take the tickets from me and looked at jeremy, waiting for me to hand him the boarding passes to present. I refused, jeremy refused, and I thought for a moment we may be creating an international incident before the taker finally relented, took the tickets from my hand, put them down as quickly as possible and then used one pinky to flick them off of each other, as if they were tainted with some kind of infectious lady juice. No more EgyptAir for us. On the plus side, the airplane windows didn’t have shades but a button which, when pushed, somehow magically tinted them. So that was fun.

Paris was great. Hayden picked the Catacombs as the thing he wanted to see and we did a guided tour which was really interesting and, damn, that’s a lot of bones. Zeni picked the Eiffel Tower which we showed up for only to realize our tickets were for the next evening. This error on my part turned into a delightful outting where we wandered the city until past midnight and saw the fountains going off and the tower lighting up, street performers, crepes avec Nutella, and generally enjoyed ourselves almost like a functional family would.

We returned 24 hours later and went to the top of the tower which was windy and beautiful and très agréable until, at the top, zeni realized she was terrified of riding down in the elevator. Jeremy gave her a long lecture about the physics of pulleys which (shocker) didnt do much to calm her so we road down the first bactch of packed elevators with her sobbing and then walked down the next set to the bottom. Thwt’s 1,120 steps for anyone keeping track.

Our hotel was close to the Bastille with beaucoup de restaurants close by so Jeremy and I got to sneak away out for a few meals on own which was delightful. Turns out snails are only useful as a conduit for butter and garlic and are not very tasty on their own. Also turns out that 🍷 makes that ok with me.

As always there were crappy times too. Times when one of our kids acted so put out and sour about having to walk instead of Lime Scooter a mile along one of the most famous river banks you would have thought they were raised by the Egyptians (joke! Im sure the women and the men we did NOT run into are lovely people!) or when the pizza we walked forever to find appeared with actual, real live chunks of tomatoes on it. Zut alors!!

We also had a Griswald-like experience at the Louvre where we were in some kind of tourist cluster fuck of people circling the entrance to a wing we wanted to go to and were never quite in the right position at the right time to peel away from the group and make a break for the entrance. “Look kids! Mona Lisa! Winged Victory!” The kids and I finally made it out and left jeremy, who could spend days and days in museums, to fend for himself.

Train travel remains one of my favorite ways to get around and the high speed train from Paris to Barcelona did not dissapoint. Hurtling throught the countryside catching glimpses of Roman aquaducts with frequent trips to the cafe car was fantastic. Jeremy and I had a pre-departure consult about weather our kid who is prone to motion sickness needed to be medicated and decided that no one gets motion sick on a train. Wrong. We arrived in Barcelona minus two sets of clothes, plus one new and hard earned nugget of knowledge.