Stuck!

Right now I should be on a cruise in the Aegean Sea.  But I'm not.  You see, the cruise left Venice on Saturday and we (me, Robert, Christian, and Robert's brother - Aaron) were stuck in Paris.  I shall explain...
There is a volcano in Iceland, whose name no one can pronounce.  This particular volcano began errupting last week spewing volcanic ash into the atmosphere which was then blown over most of Europe.  This meant pretty much all of European airspace was a huge no-fly zone, grounding airplanes and closing nearly all airports on the Continent and British Isles.  Here is where our problems began. 

We had a flight on Friday afternoon.  We figured this would give us a full day of wiggle room to get down to our cruise if our flight was delayed, or if for some reason we needed to take a train to make it to the cruise in time. But our flight was not delayed, it was cancelled...along with every other flight in Paris. 

Apparently, the other thousands of passengers who had their flights cancelled had the same ideas we did: get a train.  Not so fast!  To compound this problem the French rail workers (SNCF) were on strike.  I think this mostly meant that trains traveling just within France were directly affected, but in any case it made it even more difficult to get a train.  In summary, the other stranded airline passengers got to the trains first, so all the trains were full until well into the next week.  That meant no one could get trains to London, the Netherlands, Brussels, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, southern France, etc.

So, we looked into our other option: renting a car.  Well, again, with thousands of airline passengers stranded and all the trains full, the cars were sold out pretty fast.  Grrrr. 

Okay, maybe a bus.  Called the bus line - next available bus was Wednesday.  What was our last option: take a taxi.  Well, with Robert laughing hysterically at the prospect, Aaron called a few taxi companies.  The quote: $2000 to take us to Venice.  Okay, so that was not really a realistic option.

Our trip was going to include this cruise and then about a week in Italy.  This is Robert's Spring Break and we had been saving our travels until now since he has had so much school work.  We are still trying to get to Italy so that it isn't a total loss of a vacation.  We get no refund on the cruise, and now have to pay for hotels and food on top of that.  But we really want a vacation while we're here.  Our flight is rescheduled for Tuesday afternoon, so we'll see if planes are flying by then.  Plus we have a back up plan to get a rental car (now that some are being returned). 

Until then we will just hang out in Paris. I know, that doesn't sound too bad. But it is certainly not the same. We cleaned out the fridge before our flight, so we're eating frozen dinners from the grocery store - instead of cruise buffet food or Greek spanikopitas and gyros or authentic Italian food (sigh).  Christian is going nuts because we're taking up all of his (small) play space in the apartment with our luggage - which he tries to unpack for us.  And we're trying to see things that we haven't seen yet, like Sainte Chappelle and the Pantheon.  They are much lower on the list than Italy or Greece, but I guess it's our best option.


I'll keep you posted.