Down and Out at Charles de Gaulle

I still, at 54, think I can manage almost anything. A motto from one of the clans on my dad’s side is “Endure with Strength” and I have maybe taken that to extremes at times, but it comes in handy when you’re sitting in the dentist’s chair, for example, getting another crown because you lived in a place without fluoridated water as a child.

However, I may have come to the end of what I am willing to tolerate in terms of overnighting in airports. It’s either that or getting much more savvy about how to do it comfortably, like the older Indian women I observed who had managed to grab loungers in a hidden corner of Charles de Gaulle (CDG) in Paris, an airport that seasoned travelers love to hate.

Last November, on my way back to Gabon after a rather hastily-planned trip to London to meet my younger daughter, during which I also scheduled a skin biopsy, I had thirteen hours, from 9 p.m. to 10 a.m., at CDG, an place I have come to know too well in the last two years.

It was unpleasant, even with a long stretch at the Yotel, a very basic lounge that we get access to with the credit card we were advised to acquire upon embarking on the diplomatic life. Airport lounge access is something fairly new to me; I hadn’t traveled enough to really need it and the idea of paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of using a credit card seemed absolutely ridiculous. Now, though, during 24-36 hours of travel to and from post, for example, a comfortable chair, a glass of wine, some cheese, crackers, and fruit, and the quiet a lounge offers feel worth it. When Nate and I flew to Cyprus last fall, we had seven hours in the Athens airport on the way back; we arrived at 11 p.m. and snuggled into deep leather chairs in one of the lounges there after tea and olives and feta, falling fast asleep with our legs draped over our suitcases. And the points we’re able to rack up pay for our hotel stays in Paris, making those trips possible.

Unfortunately, all that’s available at CDG with the card we have is the Yotel. Air France won’t let you in to their lounge unless you’re flying business class, often not even if you’re willing to pay the $100, the most recent price of admission. (Sometimes they’ll “let” you pay if it’s not full, but it’s always been full when I go through, and honestly, for me to justify the expense I’d have to drink at least a bottle of Taittinger, the champagne they serve, which would cause a whole other set of issues, because almost everything about Air France pisses me off and I would probably become intensely, loudly honest about that after glass number two).

At the Yotel, deep in the bowels of “L” terminal (I will not bother to try to explain the completely nonsensical way the terminals at CDG are labelled and organized; if you know, you know, and if you don’t know, you’re fine) you can pay to get an actual room, a closet with a bed, really. After the night I am about to recount, I might consider it next time, if fortune finds me in that situation again, especially because I took advantage of the free shower option and wish I hadn’t.

The Yotel lounge looks like something you’d expect a lounge called “Yotel” to look like: worn carpets, plastic chairs with fabric seats, a coffee machine that will make everything from coffee to hot chocolate to a “cappuccino,” baskets of Kinder chocolate, granola bars, salty snacks, hard fruit, water and soda and juice, and little bottles of wine, red, white, rosé (but they take those away at dawn, I was amused to observe this last time, apparently eschewing the idea that in an airport, it can be five o’clock no matter what time it actually is). Signs admonish you to consume “on the premises” all you take, no stuffing your pockets with goodies for later. It’s kind of like the waiting room at the Toyota dealership I took my car to, but without any workstations (I graded a lot of essays at those workstations), except they keep replenishing the baked goods. At Charlie’s Toyota in Augusta, Maine, once the donuts are gone, you’re out of luck for the day.

I arrived at the Yotel around 11 p.m., having walked as slowly as I could from my arrival gate, not taking the moving walkways, climbing the stairs instead of standing on the escalator, not rushing to get on the train that was about to leave for the other terminals but just taking my own sweet time, trying to kill as much of it as possible.

The lounge was all but empty, I could see as I approached the desk, and my hopes soared that the one corner I’d determined, from past experience, that would allow me to set up camp safely, would be free. The concierge seemed surprised that I didn’t have a room reservation; I just looked steadily back at him when he said “you have three hours.” That would get me to 2 a.m., and unless the lounge suddenly filled to bursting, I’d be able to renew it then for another three hours.

My corner was indeed free! It was the one place where I could keep my back to the wall and turn a couple chairs around to make a little campsite for myself. I got a couple bottles of water and some wet wipes and wiped down the little table, wiped my hands and my neck and behind my ears, pulled out the thin fleece blanket I’d swiped from Air France a few flights back, snuggling under it and the zipper hoodie from my friend’s bar in Talkeetna, Alaska. I wasn’t comfortable, but I wasn't going anywhere.

My face throbbed where I’d had the biopsies, the bandage wet-feeling from the kelp-product the surgeon had packed the wounds with. The child I’d seen to her plane earlier in the day at Heathrow had landed safely in Boston, and her father had picked her up. London had been in full holiday swing: Christmas markets everywhere, Regent and Oxford streets packed with tourists, special tea menus, decorations in all the pubs. I’d loved the weather: a winter sun occasionally breaking through low clouds, the damp chill soothing my bones like a cold hand on a fevered cheek.

To make the trip work on short notice, though, I had to have this night in an airport that has reduced me to tears in the past, because when you don’t know it well and you’ve left everything you’ve known behind to go live on a continent you’ve never been on and you’re exhausted from months, years even, of preparation and if you have to go through security one more time you swear to God someone’s going to get hurt and then sure enough you go through the wrong door the wrong gate the wrong wrong wrong, you can’t go back the way you came and fuck you’re suddenly not where you need to be and all you want to do is lie down and cry.

“You can’t go back the way you came.” This was not the time for metaphorical lessons, I had fumed at the universe. I didn’t need to re-fucking learn that the only way through is through. I know. Good Lord, I know.

I needed to have a “corrective emotional experience,” as one of my psychologist friends says, with Charles de Gaulle Airport, but as that is never going to happen, I’d settle for not having to go through security unnecessarily and call it good.

And that, at least, I have managed, thus far.

At 2 a.m., the concierge came around with his little machine and I had to tap my card again, or hold up my phone, I don’t remember which. I asked to reserve a shower room and his eyes got a little wide, but he brought me a towel and gave me a key.

When I opened the door to the “shower room” (just one small room, maybe 8’x8’, with a toilet, a sink, a shower head in one corner and drain beneath it, none of it particularly clean-seeming), I understood why his eyes had gotten wide. I’m guessing that people who look like me, whatever their assumptions about that are, don’t often ask for this “amenity.”

I have bathed in creeks, lakes, restaurant sinks, and from garden hoses, and I would do any of those things again before showering in another Yotel.

I settled back down, worse for wear, in my corner for another nap, and awoke to a little ruckus across the lounge. The staff was removing all the beer and wine from the shelves, getting ready for “breakfast,” which just seemed to involve scrubbing the place of adult beverages and replacing the pastries. One of the young men took a bite out of each old one before tossing it in the trash.

Time to go, even though boarding for my flight to Libreville was still almost five hours away.

Of the two terminals in CDG I’ve flown out of, there is an okay one and a terrible one. I won’t tell you which is which because again, if you’ve been there, you know, and if you haven’t, it’s best not to raise your hopes that you won’t get the terrible one. I usually get the terrible one, made more terrible because I learned, having flown out of the other one once or twice, that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Let’s just say that you’ll only make the airport sushi mistake once.

You can get a decent croissant in the terrible terminal, though, and you can wander all the way to one end and down some stairs, and park yourself in a metal lounger that is fixed to the ground and look at airplanes for a little while. There is a bathroom down another flight of stairs there that no one ever seems to use, and it’s very clean.

Before I rode the train to the terrible terminal, though, I wandered around and around all the vast empty hallways and corners and behind stairwells and in one of these nooks I found the aforementioned army of ingenious old Indian ladies, comfortably sound asleep in soft loungers the likes of which I’d not seen anywhere else on my terminal tours. Their saris were pulled over their faces, their bags tucked around them like pillows. This was clearly not their first rodeo, and definitely not their first overnight at Charles de Gaulle. So that’s how you do it. Noted.

After my night at CDG, the eight-hour flight to Libreville seemed like nothing, and for that I am grateful. Before we landed, I peeled off my compression socks and stripped down to a single layer. I saw lighting strike, and looked for the embassy as we came in on final. The thick air closed in on me the moment I stepped off the plane, but I didn’t mind this time.

I was, for the moment, home.

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