Excess baggage

A life lesson that seems to require constant relearning

I haven’t posted in a few weeks as I took an extended vacation in France and Italy. I intended to do some writing. I like recording the observations and insights from new environments when they’re fresh. But as it turned out my body battery was fully spent at the end of each day. My inability to write while traveling revealed another of the cracks in myself that only widen with age. I recall riding the Tour Divide in 2009, pushing the limits of my physical and emotional energy every day, and still taking the time to write in-depth blog updates on an ancient device that resembled a cheap Blackberry, which required punching tiny individual keys to compose e-mails to publish badly-formatted posts to my Blogspot remotely. These days, I can’t even find the mental capacity for a single-sentence social media post.

It was my mother’s surprising idea to take this trip. I use the adjective surprising because it isn’t Mom’s typical mode of operation to take the lead on something so far outside her daily routine. But it has been her dream to see Paris with her daughters and granddaughters, and she made it happen. It is within my mom’s typical mode of operation to squeeze every last drop of opportunity from her travels, so the six of us took the City of Love by storm during the first week of June. A week in Paris with my family was a worthwhile experience and incredibly taxing. The cracks from my anxiety widen exponentially in crowds.

As my mom organized her dream trip to Paris, my friend Danni proposed a 10-day bikepacking trip on a route she’d been eyeing for a while, the Torino-Nice Rally. I coaxed the timing to work so I could leave Paris on June 8, travel to Nice, and then join Danni and two other friends, Amber and Lora, in Tornio on June 9. It seemed like a great travel plan from a distance, but the execution stretched me to the limits of my tolerance. Those cracks have become so wide that I wonder how and where I’ll find the reserves to travel again.

Like many anxious people, I dislike traveling. Don’t get me wrong, I love pursuing adventures in beautiful and exciting places, but the physical act of getting there is the worst. Since COVID, it seems like air travel has become particularly grueling. What used to be rare inconveniences — lost luggage, long delays, canceled flights, convoluted alternatives — have become the expected norm. I all but built these expectations into my itinerary, and I still landed on my ass at every turn.

Air travel complaints always make for boring stories. I know this, but let me try to set a scene. From the outset, way back in November, I paid a premium for a direct flight from Denver to Paris with Delta Airlines so I could coordinate the trip with my family. But of course, the fine print — which admittedly I missed — told me the flight was operated by Air France, which has seemingly no experience transporting bicycles. My flight out of Denver left nearly three hours delayed, and then my bicycle didn’t show up in Paris. While I waited through these delays, the driver who I hired specifically so I’d have a sure way to transport my bicycle waited for hours, accruing the expected fees. I could have just jumped on the Metro if I showed up in Paris without all of the crap I was carrying. (A bicycle bag weighing 20.1 kilograms, and a suitcase with all of my camping gear, clothing, snacks, and other supplies weighing 21.2 kilograms.)

It took five full days for my bicycle to be located and transported to the apartment in Paris, just two days before we were set to leave. I was already considering an alternative hiking trip or simply changing my ticket and flying home early. Rental bikes were not a viable alternative for our tour. Without that extra week in Paris, my bike trip would have been ruined.

Originally, I planned to store my luggage with a service, build up my bike, and put it on trains from Paris to Torino. As it turns out, most French trains will not allow bicycles. So I bought plane tickets to transport the load to and from Nice, and then my friends and I fudged some rules to load our bikes on trains to Torino. The 10-day ride was, of course, the easiest leg of the travels. As long as our muscles kept working, forward motion was achievable.

My friends flew home from Nice this past Friday, and I settled in to burn up an entire day waiting for my inexplicably late EasyJet flight from Nice to Paris (why did I book the last flight of the day? The reasons elude me.) Due to air traffic control problems, nearly every flight out of Nice after 9 p.m. was canceled. EasyJet automatically booked me on a flight the following morning that left Nice at 7 a.m., landed in Manchester, England, and didn’t leave Manchester until 7 p.m. after a 10-hour layover. The online booking subsequently dropped every change I tried to make to this flight, and unceremoniously dropped me in the middle of booking a supposedly comped hotel. I ended up booking the last hotel room available on Booking.com, rebooked my Saturday flight to Denver to a Sunday, and rushed out of the airport fighting back tears while dragging 100+ pounds of garbage.

I could have caught a tram to transport my crap to a point closer to the hotel, but it was all too much. I never wanted to use another useless piece of public transportation again. Instead I walked, gasping because the weight of my luggage was maxing out my lung capacity. Sometime during this angry march, I badly pulled a muscle in my left forearm. I arrived at the hotel at 11:34 p.m. only to find a line of people out the door. The hotel was a Radisson, and I guess mid-level luxury necessitates the slowest check-in policy that is humanly possible. By 12:20 a.m., a 40-something woman from Seattle, myself, and a beautiful young Brazilian woman had lapsed into unfiltered ranting toward the man behind the counter, who smirked at us while he bantered in French for 10 minutes with the next set of people he was helping. But the three of us had formed a gratifying camaraderie amid the indignity of it all, and this brief friendship saved me from lapsing into an embarrassing public panic attack. By 12:48 a.m., I finally had the freedom to curl up on the stiff sheets of my €330 hotel bed and cry my heart out.

After I had my cry, I decided spending Saturday laying over in Manchester was ridiculous. I did learn it could be worse — the Brazilian woman wasn’t able to rebook a flight out of Nice until Monday, and that was after paying out of pocket for a flight through Air France. Still, I needed some way out of this nightmare, one that ensured I never had to stand in a torturous EasyJet luggage line again (they kick you out if you show up even a minute earlier than two hours before your flight and make you wait in the line all over again!) I grabbed my phone and booked a train ticket. I knew my luggage was too big for the train, but if they wouldn't let me on the train with my stuff, fine. I was leaving that shit behind and never looking back.

Walking out of the Radisson with my luggage proved my left arm was far too hurt to be of much use anymore. This set in motion a series of booking Uber rides and Welcome Pickups to help me transport my garbage as far as possible. I was already throwing so much money at this aggravation, so why stop with taxis? Gratefully, I was able to board the train without problems, even though every seat was occupied and my bike bag slumped into the aisle, blocking the exit (I did what I could with my extra Velcro straps to secure the bag to the luggage rack.) Riding a train across the French countryside was quite enjoyable, although again 30 minutes delayed, and I spent most of that time booking various things from my phone and writing a strongly worded e-mail to EasyJet.

About halfway en route, I remembered that Paris Gare de Lyon was nowhere near the airport, and even worse, it was in the center of the busy city. So I booked a last-minute Welcome Pickup ride, for which I was rejected four times due to having a bike bag. The driver who accepted my request was an Indian man, Kamalrajah, who proved to be excellent company as I sat squeezed into the front seat of his small Hyundai sedan through 80 minutes of Paris traffic. He sheepishly offered an off-the-books ride from my hotel to the airport terminal the next morning. The terminal was 2.1 kilometers away and I had considered walking, even with my hurt arm, but for €30 — which seemed reasonable and which would all go into the pocket of this nice man (plus tip) — I wouldn’t have to drag this immense burden much farther. I accepted and gave him a pickup time that was two hours before my flight.

“Oh no,” he insisted. “This is Paris. You must be at the airport at least three hours before your flight.” He predicted the time it would take with traffic and gave me the strange meeting time of 10:20 a.m., then showed up 10 minutes early, then insisted on carrying both of my bags and not letting me do any of the work.

Kamalrajah’s prediction about the Paris airport proved abundantly prescient. The customer service agent at the Air France counter was beyond perplexed about my bike bag. He initially said no, grabbed a colleague when I began to protest, and then told me there would be a €100 oversize fee. Great! I’ll pay anything. But then he left and the colleague got on the phone with international Air France customer service, where the agent proceeded to wait on hold — occasionally talking in French — for nearly an hour. I’m not kidding. I timed from the moment I walked up to the desk to when I finally walked away. It was 67 minutes. That was how long I stood at a customer service desk, holding up that part of the line for everyone else, because multiple people employed by the company had never dealt with a bike bag. The final verdict was a $125 fee, and I even had to return to the agent once more to have her print up an official receipt after the oversize baggage handlers sent me away.

“That’s ridiculous,” Beat said when I told him the story about what was seemingly the first bicycle to ever board an international Air France flight (since my bike clearly did not end up on such a flight on the way to Paris. I’m sure Delta found and delivered it.) “This is the country with the Tour de France.”

I admit, more than once during this weekend debacle, I considered dropping my baggage and walking away. This stuff was too much and I didn’t need any of it. I very nearly came to this point while standing interminably at the Air France customer service counter. What’s the worst that would happen? They would arrest me on suspicion of terrorism for abandoning my luggage? That did not seem so bad.

More rationally, I pondered why I brought so much luggage in the first place. Sure, a bike trip that included camping was fun. But why would I choose such a thing when I could load a small backpack with two changes of clothing and simply walk and be free? I’d probably be cold and wet much of the time, but I’d be free.

And now I’ve written a long boring story about travel woes. I promise my stories about the trip itself will be more interesting with better photos. But this story holds that cliched, ever-important lesson that we must constantly relearn: Life is never going to work out according to plan, so lean into flexibility. We’re all freer without the excess baggage.