Day 9 – Sunday
Well, kudos to Dan and his suggestion/insistence that we spend the last night at the CGD Sheraton. Located right above Terminal 2, the rooms nonetheless provided for a very peaceful slumber considering we were smack dab in the middle of an active international airport.
Oh, the convenience of waking up, grabbing our things and exiting from the hotel right into one of the terminals cannot be underestimated. Granted, we were departing from a different terminal (No. 1) and thus had to take a shuttle train between them. (The same journey taken round trip, BTW, that figured into our missing the Bordeaux flight on arrival day.) But we built in enough time to not only allow for the unexpected backlog of passengers queued up at the first security checkpoint, but to provide us with a leisurely check-in, a swift passport stamping, a surprisingly-thorough, almost-intimate full-body security frisking and some last-minute concourse shopping before boarding and take-off.
Upon arrival state-side, Global Access once again proved its worth as we just looked at the screen and the doors opened to the USA.
If there was a hitch about our return trip, it was the mysterious and unbeknownst seat changes made by United on our last leg. I had booked us aisle seats for the 54 minute flight to Cleveland. But, when checking in, I discovered we had both been moved to middle Coach seats without so much as a whisper from United. And there were no aisle seats available. I was able to switch to a middle seat in an exit row, providing the needed legroom. However, the system balked at changing Rob’s seat assignment. It was at luggage check-in that he was successfully moved to the adjacent window seat. Catastrophe avoided!
One final thing: taxi-delivered, we were secure in our hilltop domicile unpacking when…the power went off! Fortunately, this was not a repeat of the tornado-induced, multi-day outages of a few weeks ago. The lights were back on in less than two minutes.
Bordeaux 