The first morning of 1999 begin with an irritating beeping sound. It was the alarm on Shari's Palm. Tests of the alarm function earlier in the week had failed, causing us to be suspicious of the alarm and wonder if perhaps it would only go off if the Palm was on—a truly silly way to arrange things, since the Palm turns itself off if left untouched for a couple of minutes. But it was the only alarm we had since my digital watch had died, and we didn't want to depend totally on the hotel's wake-up call.

I got up and a few moments later my activity stirred Shari enough to poke her head out from under the covers and ask what time it was. She hadn't heard the alarm, and to this day has only my word for it that the alarm on her Palm really does work. A few minutes later, the phone rang—our hotel wake-up call, also right on time.

Our preparations for departure were surprisingly streamlined considering how long we'd been here getting settled into this little room. We had had our showers and packed our bags the night before, so there was little to do but stick the last-minute toiletries into the bags and check around for forgotten items.

Hauling our two rolling suitcases three flights down the creaky, spiralling stairs seemed like less than a great idea, yet we once again found that we couldn't fit into the tiny elevator. I sent Shari down the steps alone while I wrestled the two suitcases into the elevator, exhaled deeply, and slid myself in alongside them.

By the time I emerged near the front desk and got both of our bags out of the elevator, Shari already had the checkout process well underway. I had expected some arguments at checkout time, but either everything was in order or Shari had already fixed it, because they weren't trying to charge us any real money. The computer records seemed to already indicate that our lodging was pre-paid and that our breakfast, normally an extra charge, was included. I was quite impressed—when I've traveled on business in the US with rooms pre-paid by corporate account, the hotel clerks more often than not can find no record of any pre-payment. The clerk asked us to pay only for a couple of incidentals: a phone call and $3.50 for the Coke Shari had had from the mini-bar. Shari paid it with some of the Francs we had left, appalled by the cost of the soda but almost glad to not have so many Francs to try to exchange once we got home.

It was just about 7:45, the appointed time for our van pickup, so we couldn't sit and eat breakfast. Shari popped down the stairs to the Cave and came back with a couple of croissants and glasses of juice. She reappeared just as the van was pulling up, so we downed the juice, crammed the croissants into our faces, and went outside into the cool pre-dawn darkness.

The driver loaded our suitcases into the back of the van, and we settled in among the other passengers, gazing out the windows for our last views of Paris. The van only made one or two other stops in the center of the city, and then we were off on the hour-long drive to the airport.

We noticed as we made our way into the suburbs how different this Paris was from the Paris where we'd spent our week. This far from the older central part of the city, the narrow avenues open up, and the intricately carved beige stone buildings gradually give way to a landscape more like suburban America, with fields, office parks, factories, and freeways. We found proof positive that the dynamics of space and cost were shifting when Shari spotted a Toys 'R Us from the highway.

In the last few minutes as we approached the airport, we were treated to a fine view of the skyline of the city under amber sunrise skies—a beautiful image to hold in our minds as we made our way home.

Finally, we were at our terminal at the Charles de Gaulle airport. We reclaimed our suitcases and tipped the driver, having carefully reserved enough Francs for the purpose.

In the terminal, we found the British Airways counters, but first had to complete another stop. As is to be expected in Europe, France has a VAT of something just under 20%, paid on all purchases, which foreigners can sometimes partially recover if they make their way through a minefield of special conditions and the mechanics of the paperwork.

Shari, who had researched the subject carefully, had met all of the preliminary conditions. She had bought enough value of merchandise in one store at one time to surpass the qualifying minimum, and had been through the pain and hassle at the store of logging each item and getting the forms in order. The next step was to take the paperwork and the goods to a customs counter at the airport, prove by showing the goods and our tickets that we were taking the stuff out of the country, and get a stamp on the paperwork.

It is fairly clear that while the French do allow a refund of the VAT, they aren't especially eager to actually cough up the money. For the few like Shari who are smart and dedicated enough to get this far, the French have four more little tricks up their sleeves to cause a percentage of people to give up and to extract at least a few Francs from the rest.

Trick 1: The queue at the customs counter: it's long, about an hour on this particular morning. Since by definition everybody in the queue has a plane to catch, and has not even checked in yet (you have to show the goods to the customs official, which means having your checked luggage still with you), many people will be unable or unwilling to risk missing their flight for their VAT refund.

Trick 2: Heaven forbid that you should get your money on the spot or, more unthinkable yet, just not pay it at the store in the first place. Instead, you receive a validated form from the customs counter which must then be mailed in. A few people will fail to complete this step properly. For the rest, the French government still gets to "ride the float" on their money for a few weeks. A few quick mental estimates convinced me that there is a _LOT_ of money in that float.

Trick 3: Your check arrives weeks later, mailed to your foreign address, in Francs drawn on a French bank. Many tourists won't have access to the banking mechanisms to cash such a check, especially if it's for a small amount as, no doubt, most of them are.

Trick 4: Out of your refund, the French take a percentage for their handling fee. Even if you've made it this far, they are still not going to take a loss on you.

We settled on a reasonable time after which we would have to give up and go check in for our flight, and after coming close but not exceeding that time, Shari did get to the counter to get her paperwork processed. Mercifully, the customs officer didn't ask to see the goods, and once she made it to the counter the process was fairly quick. She folded the forms neatly into their envelope and mailed them from the mailbox strategically placed beside the customs VAT-refund counter for just that purpose.

It was a fairly quick process after that to get through the check-in at British Airways, through French immigration, and up through the Habitrail tubes to the correct gate area. We had a small snack which used virtually the last of our Francs, and waited for our plane.

A quick one-hour flight on a jam-packed airplane that tantalized us with some brief glimpses of the beautiful English countryside put us back once again at Heathrow. After running the gerbil maze and getting our film fogged by their X-rays again, we re-emerged into the duty-free mall and money extraction zone euphemistically called the "Departure Lounge."

Shari had fun dropping a few centimes of French coins into a machine to receive in return a few pence in equally useless English coins. I didn't stop to figure the exchange rate: it was probably frightful, but interesting nonetheless because the moneychangers generally won't take coins no matter what the rate. Whatever bits of change we had left—English or French—were now too little to be useful for any purpose and would probably go into the little UNICEF donation envelopes on the transatlantic flight which take advantage of the cumulative value of all the coins that are otherwise destined for distant sock drawers.

Once again, we were hungry but a bit short on time, so we went back to the bar where we'd had a snack on the outgoing trip. I went to the counter to put in our order, and heard them telling another customer that they were running an hour behind on food. They'd been ridiculously slow the last time, so we just gave up and left.

Shari did a little shopping in the duty-free area, looking particularly for "Brittania," a beanie-baby bear only sold in England that her mother wanted as a rare prize for her collection. Many of the gift shops had displays of beanie babies, but the trouble was we had no idea what "Brittania" might look like, or what other ones might be rare or hard to find at home. We checked the bookstores for a beanie baby book that might help, but didn't find one. Finally, Shari was able to enlist some help from another American shopper at one of the beanie baby stands who knew something about the cult and culture that surround these things. She assured us that we wouldn't find "Brittania"—due to the rarity and desirability created by their limited distribution, they are snapped up long before they ever reach retail counters. This lady had been all over England collecting beanie babies and hadn't seen a "Brittania" yet. Beanie-baby collectors frequently pursue their hobby with a dedication somewhere between fanatical and downright rabid, so we weren't at all surprised at this news.

Eventually our gate information came on the monitors and, exactly as expected, it was at the farther end of the mall from where we were. It wasn't totally at the opposite end, but only because we'd been smart enough to stay nearer to the middle, knowing that if we were at one end our gate would be chosen at the other. We stopped in a gift shop for some chips and drinks, a weak consolation for not having gotten any real food, and I had to ask if they would take US dollars. They would, which led to a bizarre transaction in which I paid three dollars and got back four pence change. We made our way to the gate and sat in the crowded waiting area eating our chips and waiting for boarding.

We discovered about this time—way too late—that the ticket agent in Paris had screwed us: instead of the seats we had carefully chosen and pre-reserved, we had been given boarding passes for two center seats together, in the middle of the middle section of the aircraft.

As one might expect, the flight home was particularly long and painful. Instead of 9 hours 15 minutes stretched out in four seats, we suffered well over 12 hours crammed into about 1.5 seats. We were near the front in the middle section and so unable to see any of the monitors so as to pass the time watching any of the movies or video, and between the bright daylight and the constant elbowing, we weren't able to sleep much either.

One high point was a very funny yet informative nature documentary about different species of lemurs hosted by British comedian John Cleese. It was short, which was probably a good thing, because we were both flirting with serious neck injury trying to see enough of any TV screen to get some idea what was going on with it.

Eons later, we touched down in San Francisco, and were finally able to be re-united with our coats and to restore circulation into long-forgotten body parts as we worked our way gradually off the plane.

We strolled through parts of the airport that I had only seen once or twice and that Shari never even knew existed, and went under a loudspeaker in the ceiling greeting visitors with a recorded loop of cheesy audio greetings from San Francisco's laughing-stock mayor, Willie Brown. He enlightened visitors with such pearls of wisdom as: "If you are visiting San Francisco for the first time, you are in for a treat!".

The baggage carousel was mobbed with people, but I found that it seemed almost sparse compared to the airplane or to any place else we'd been in the past week. We recovered our bags relatively painlessly by a relay system, with Shari spotting them and me charging around the carousel, diving over people, and dragging the suitcases off the belt and right over representative samples of the body parts people kept trying to put in the way.

With the bags teetering on a cart, we cleared immigration and customs, the customs agent stopping us only long enough to eyeball our forms and ask what kind of wristwatches I'd bought. The customs agents seemed in a good mood and didn't even seem to mind when I stopped the cart, causing a small bag to fly off and almost land on an agent's feet.

Finally in the United States legally as well as physically, we made our way to the top level of the terminal. The sunshine streaming in the front windows seemed rejuvenating and comfortingly familiar after a week of Paris overcast, and it reminded us that this really was California.

Incidentally, Shari was disappointed at immigration once again—not only had the French not stamped our passports either coming or going, but the American immigration agent hadn't bothered to stamp them either. We had no documented government-sanctioned proof that we'd been anywhere!

Shari sat on a bench with the suitcases while I went to find a pay phone and call the parking lot for a ride. I was half afraid that it would be "no such number, no such parking lot," but after many rings, someone did answer. I had more trouble with the language barrier this time than I'd had anywhere in France, but finally was able to get across to the attendant what terminal we were in, and understand her response that the van was already at the airport and we should go to the blue and white curb for pickup. I had to ask what would be printed on the van so that I could distinguish it from the myriad of other parking company vans. This one was "Park and Shuttle and Fly", not to be confused with competitors such as "Park and Fly," "Park and Sky," or "Skypark." The local airport parking industry is evidently not a teeming hotbed of creative thought.

We went out to the designated curb and began to wait in the pleasantly warm sunshine outside the airport. There is a secret law of airport parking shuttles that they are not allowed to appear until after a prescribed delay, that delay being long enough to do two things: 1) cause the passengers to question the wisdom of having chosen this method of parking/transit, and 2) allow the shuttles from every single parking company other than the one in question to pass by, and at least half of them to pass twice. This parking company was well in compliance with the secret law. Finally, the shuttle did appear, and we hauled our suitcases up the stairs and perched on the little vinyl seats.

My car was exactly where we'd left it, and the only difficulty was getting the driver to stop at the right place—he didn't speak much English and the car was in a weird place without a stall number or aisle number. We packed our suitcases into the car, and the worn-out old engine purred to life on the first turn.

We paid, much less than we'd expected, and zipped off down the highway in the light traffic, once again free of itineraries and plans and in charge of our own schedules from moment to moment.

As we headed down the peninsula for home, the skies turned fiery orange as the sun began to set over the ocean on one side of us, illuminating a pale yellowish moon low over the hills on the other side, a sight as unique to the bay area as it was to the particular positions of sun and moon at that hour on that night.

Sunrise over the skyline of Paris, sunset over San Francisco: it was a fitting way to mark such a day.

| Intro | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight |

All text and photographs copyright © 1999 Sam A. Mahmoud and Sharilyn Horne.