Planes, Trams, and Taxis

 Sunday June 19

This is it, last fragment of a day in Turkey. All alarms went off at 1:10 to begin our last Turkish Taxi ride. We left a little early so as to have time to find the lounge and get a few early breakfast calories in. The lounge in the Istanbul interrnational terminal was outstanding, note the baby grand in the background. It was, no exaggerating, larger than the airport that we flew out of Cappadochia from the day before. They had a pretty decent food selection considering the time. The pida (pizza) oven was not fired up for breakfast :-(.

Turkish Air seemed always to be late. We got used to that and may have lounged a bit too long. When we got to our gate for the Air France flight to Chuck D in Paris they were already on last call before gate closure.

Chuck D (Charles De Galle) airport is the biggest maze of a complex airport I have ever been in. Tara was wondering why, my guess is that it is likely originally quite old and they have just keep adding capacity however they can. As opposed to the brand new Istanbul airport that seems to be setting the new standard. Our plane landed and taxied forever only to end in a tarmac exit. Then we bussed forever to the dropoff. Then we trammed to a different section of the airport and finally did the normal walk-a-thon to the lounge.

I skipped the inflight viddles in anticipation of the international lounge in this huge airport. We were shocked and saddened (#1stWorldProblems) at this sorry excuse for a lounge. We, now the consumate loungineers, have world class standards. No hot food, only free water and coffee, but we had 40Euro to spend on junk food. Popcorn, M&Ms, sugar waffles, cocktail nuts and olives.

Patti was actually excited because they had Smarties on the menu. This is the only candy that Patti can eat her fill of as it has dextrose and not fructose. Smarting she was when her disappointment arrived. These are Nestle knockoffs of M&Ms, hello fructose. I did note the Nutri-Score on these being E which must mean Egregious.

The girls hooked a Dad up on Fathers Day with 810 grams of the precious. Duty free! I color-popped a few of pictures of the girls on this trip and sent them their way to no applause. I was informed that color-poping was so 2016, so I am going back to the future, it is Fathers Day after all.

Ok, getting on the 9.5 hour flight From Paris to Denver in a few.