Coming home

Getting out of France turned out to be more of an adventure than I wanted it to be. I arrived about 0845 for a 1005 flight, which I figured would be plenty of time. Unfortunately, when I went to the Air France check-in desk, they couldn’t find my electronic ticket because when the helpful Delta TA in Detroit rebooked me, I’d ended up with a new number. After 15 min or so of fumbling, she directed me to the Delta desk. More fumbling ensued, then they produced an itinerary receipt. I returned to see Air France again and waited while my agent tried to reach the ticketing desk. When that failed, she walked me over to the ticketing desk; more fumbling, and I was the proud owner of a paper ticket for NCE-CDG. Apparently there’s some lingering animosity between the respective computers at DL and AF. Paper ticket in hand, I went back to the AF check-in desk and checked in. A short walk took me to my departure gate, where I boarded. The first thing I noticed was the unfortunate fact that the plane stank like a locker room. The second thing I noticed was that, after our departure time had come and gone, we were still at the gate. It turns out that some of the folks in the back weren’t in their seats; for whatever reason, the cabin crew didn’t do anything about it. Once everyone was finally strapped in, we’d missed our arrival time slot into CDG, so we sat for another 45 minutes, departing at 1110. The rest of the flight was uneventful, but I really had to hustle to make my CDG-CVG flight.
Security procedures were essentially no different than they are at US airports; the French equivalent of the TSA is no more or less efficient or polite than the average in the US (excepting such places as EWR and SEA, where TSA is chronically rude, and MCO, where they’re practically Italian in their efficiency).