Wild Dash to Airport

Shortly after 8 a.m. on the last day of a truly splendid vacation, we were almost through packing for our 10:05 a.m. flight to Paris.

The airport was only about 15 minutes away, so we had plenty of time. Or so I thought until Lucy turned to me and said, “I can’t find my passport.”

“What do you mean you can’t find your passport?”

“I’ve looked everywhere. It isn’t here. I think I must have left it in the jewelry store Saturday. I haven’t had any reason to use it since then, so that must be where it is.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Didn’t he say he was about to leave on three weeks’ vacation?”

Clearly, we had a problem. Lucy was scheduled to be back in her office the next morning, and the 10:05 flight out of Nice was the only one that would enable us to make our connecting flight from Paris to New York.

I began to look in drawers and behind the furniture and under the bed, hoping Lucy’s passport had fallen from her purse in the room. No luck. I stood on my tiptoes to feel around on the top shelf of the enormous wooden armoire.

Big mistake. My heavy garment bag was hanging on the front door of the armoire; my probing on the top shelf upset the balance.

Crashing Down

The armoire toppled over and came crashing down on top of me, pinning me between the floor and the bed. I took the brunt of it on my back and left arm. But I realized that I had suffered no serious injury, no concussion or broken bones or bad cuts.

“I’m OK,” I told Lucy.

Thus reassured, she burst into laughter. I joined her.

I must have been a most peculiar sight, sprawled face-down between floor, bed and armoire, with the armoire a shambles on top of and alongside me.

And I couldn’t move. Lucy helped me extricate myself, and we reassembled the armoire as best we could. Then we resumed our search. Still no luck.

Might Miss Flight

What could we do? If we waited for the jewelry store to open, we’d miss our flight. And if the passport wasn’t there, we’d have to apply for a new one. That would delay us even longer, and Lucy had already stretched her vacation two days longer than her allotted time.

It was past 8:30 a.m. by then, but calmly, Lucy looked into her purse to check the receipt from Saturday’s purchase. The name of the jewelry store was LaCrampe something or other.

“Maybe that’s the owner’s name,” Lucy said. “Maybe he’s the nice guy who waited on us. Maybe he lives in Nice. Maybe he’s in the phone book.”

A lot of maybes, but it was worth a try.

We went downstairs to flip through a Nice telephone directory. “LaCrampe” had three residential listings. We asked the concierge to call them.

Voila! The first one was the brother of the jeweler. But his brother’s home number was unlisted and he wouldn’t give it to us. He said we should go to the store at 9:30. The concierge hung up and relayed the message to us.

“But we can’t wait till 9:30,” I said, my French becoming only slightly more frantic. “We’d miss our plane.”

I asked Lucy to reason with the woman while I went to get our rental car and load our baggage.

Window Smashed

More bad news. When I got to the car I saw that the left rear window had been smashed and the car broken into overnight. Lucy’s new raincoat, a birthday present from her mother just before we left for France, had been the only thing in the car. It was missing.

Lucy was upset, but she was more concerned with her missing passport than with her missing raincoat, and it was clear that we didn’t have time to fill out a police report.

Lucy told me not to worry about it. She had persuaded the concierge to let her call the jeweler’s brother, she said, and had persuaded the brother to give her the jeweler’s home telephone number and, yes, the jeweler remembered waiting on us--and he had her passport.

He was, indeed, on vacation, but the passport was still in his store. We could pick it up right away.

Lucy was relieved, and delighted that she had been able to conduct all these negotiations in French.

It was 9:10 a.m. If I made like Mario Andretti, and if everything went absolutely perfectly--no traffic, no trouble parking--I figured we might be able to drive to Nice, get the passport and be at the airport by 9:45. That would leave us only 20 minutes to find the rental car agency, turn in the car, race to the gate and make the flight. It didn’t seem possible, but we roared off toward Nice.

First, we ran into a little rush-hour traffic. Then we had trouble finding the jewelry store. Lucy has a remarkable sense of direction, and figured out where the store was. While I double-parked, she ran in to get her passport.

It was 9:35 a.m. Thirty minutes to takeoff. The instant Lucy returned, I stomped the accelerator to the floorboard and sped off down the Boulevard des Anglais, along the Mediterranean toward the airport.

We pulled into the airport at 9:45 but couldn’t find the car rental agency. It was 9:55 a.m., 10 minutes to takeoff. It seemed hopeless. Finally, I saw a tiny, hand-lettered sign bearing the name of our car rental agency--on the door of another company.

I leaped out of the car and ran inside, knowing that if the clerk saw the broken window in the car, our plane would be halfway to Paris before I finished explaining and filling out forms.

Fortunately, the clerk turned out to be what so many Americans complain about but what I have almost never encountered in France--a person rude, abrupt and utterly uninterested in me or my problems.

Ceased to Exist

Without even looking up from the paper work in front of her, and in tones that suggested she resented having to deal with cars, Americans and with life itself, the woman responded to my statement of concern about missing our flight by sharply telling me to leave my keys on the counter. Then she turned away, at which point I clearly ceased to exist in her eyes.

Lugging our bulging garment bags, Lucy and I half ran, half stumbled toward the terminal. It was 10:02 when we got to the gate.

“ Trop tard ,” the man at the counter told us. Too late.

I protested that the flight wasn’t supposed to take off for another three minutes. He shrugged helplessly. I protested again. He referred me to his supervisor.

I threw myself on the supervisor’s mercy--in French (a sight to behold, I assure you). He said he’d hold the flight for us--if we had no baggage to check.

He waved us through and picked up the phone to hold the plane. We staggered like spavined mules with our garment bags past him and through the security system, ignoring shouts of protest that arose in our wake.

But our ordeal had not ended. When we boarded the plane the steward and stewardesses looked in horror at our luggage. The plane had no closets, they said. No problem, I said, as I tried to wrestle my Brobdingnagian garment bag into one of the overhead compartments.

No way. I couldn’t lift it that high and the compartments were clearly much too small to hold it.

Now what? Well, as far as I was concerned, we were aboard and the only way they’d get us off was feet first.

There were four empty seats, one each, I figured, for Lucy, me and the two garment bags. I strapped the bags into two of the seats. The steward’s horror grew. I stood, smiling but adamant, alongside the bags, reluctant to take my seat for fear that they’d just pitch our luggage off the plane, onto the runway, the instant I let them out of my sight.

An impasse? No, the steward, a pleasant enough fellow under the circumstances, agreed to speak to the pilot. The pilot approved my makeshift arrangement for the bags.

Lucy and I settled into our seats, breathless, sweating, a little embarrassed by our less-than-admirable behavior, but safe (and smiling triumphantly) at last as the plane began to taxi.

A lovely ending to a lovely vacation. And when we returned home, Lucy’s mother said she’d buy her another raincoat for Christmas.