MSY-ZRH in the aftermath of "snowpocalypse"

Charles De Gaulle Airport, Paris

February 9-10, 2010, were bad-weather days in the city of Atlanta, GA. The "snowpocalypse" that gripped the east coast for more than a week by then had come to Peachtree Street. Worse yet, it had come to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, ATL. Several thousand flights were cancelled from Tuesday to Thursday of that week, and things were still pretty chaotic by the time I was to leave for Zuerich on Saturday the 13th.

I booked an afternoon MSY-ATL flight for that Saturday, a bit of a departure from my usual get-out-early strategy. There's usually an 11:30am or so flight to ATL that I'll book, but this day, I took one with a departure time of 1:50pm. I was very lucky in this regard, because the first two flights of the day were cancelled, because the planes weren't at MSY. The mess the snow and weather made of Delta's largest hub placed a lot of their equipment out of position on Friday and Saturday. The flight I booked was coming from ATL just two hours before my flight, doing a fairly standard ATL-MSY-ATL run.

While there was lots of chaos around me, with Delta ticket agents furiously trying to re-book people from Friday as well as the two early flights that day, I was able to check in and wait in the SkyClub with little delay out front. The flight was 15 minutes delayed in taking off, but it was the 30 minute delay trying to find a gate to park at and someone to open up the plane that created all sorts of problems for me. The flight parked on "C" concourse, and I had less than 15 minutes to get from "C" out to "E" where my ATL-ZRH flight as parked. Naturally, I missed boarding by about ten minutes.

I don't know if I was just fortunate to have an efficient and sympathetic gate agent because of my Platinum status, but I like to think he would be nice enough to take care of anyone in this predicament the same way, but I was quickly re-routed to Zuerich via Paris-Charles De Gaulle Airport. Air France had a 6:30pm flight to CDG, and then I could easly connect from there on a commuter jet to ZRH.

So, in this case, the lemonade made from this mess of a flight day tasted pretty good. Air France flights to CDG always have better food than Delta flights to Europe. Walking across Paris (which is what it feels like at CDG) to get from the international terminal to the hop-flights isn't all that bad after sitting down for eight hours. The only serious downside to missing the Delta flight was that my bag didn't get transferred to the AF flight; it came in on the Sunday evening flight and was delivered to my hotel at some point while I was teaching Monday. It's been a while since I had to teach in my sweats, but the class had a sense of humor.

The return journey at the end of the week was quite uneventful, and that was just fine by me! The bus line that ran right past the hotel went all the way to ZRH, so I took the bus at 7:30am and was at the airport for 8am. Check-in went smoothly, and I slept through the main meal, not waking up until they were offering me that microwave cheese pizza Delta serves as a snack about an hour before landing. I had on my "Saints Super Bowl Champs" t-shirt on the trip, so I cleared ICE with ease. The ATL-MSY flight was a comfortable hour in first class, which was welcome after the long ride in a coach seat.

Looking forward to my next trip to Switzerland.

.