My trip back to Paris from the 4th Italian Meeting in Probability and Mathematical Statistics was somewhat horrendous, with a much delayed Transavia flight, due to technical issues in Orly that set us back more than two hours. That I could have spent at the conference or strolling through Rome…
Instead, I waited at Fiumicino, indulging into a cannolo (dinner) that was reasonable for airport standards. Then, as the repaired Boeing plane had just left the gate in Fiumicino, the staff informed us a passenger has had a vasovagal syncope and needed be evacuated, which proved relatively efficient, but nonetheless setting us back another two hours and cheery on the cake!, forcing the plane into rerouting to De Gaulle airport as Orly airport closes earlier at night for being in a denser urban area (and much closer to home as well).
When we arrived after midnight, there was of course no train home running and as usual very few taxis or Ubers around. I eventually got into one that had trouble managing the overnight road closures that plague Paris prior to the Olympics and ended up reaching home by 2am…. Resulting in an overall trip duration of 11 hours, longer than flying to Seattle or Réunion Island!
While this long trip allowed to finish in one go The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik, and hence the Scholomance trilogy, which was definitely below par when compared with the previous novels, maybe because it was taking place out of the boarding school, and hence barely sufficiently engrossing to cut the airport noise and visual pollution at bay (but with the side effet of me believing I had lost my wallet for a few minutes), I was still tired enough the following day to fail to finish a local evening 10k, dropping out after 5k (and 19’26”, which was a great time but impossible to sustain for another 5k…) The Athletics Championships were definitely and already far away!
